Your new phone, and how to improve your dancing

I think a few of you might want to go get an iPhone 3GS.



Or maybe not. Stephen Fry would recommend them - "for the moment however, no one can deny that with the iPhone 3GS the gold standard has been set."

This post is to highlight the possible benefits, if you had one, and you wanted to use it in conjunction with your salsa dancing.

So the question on a salsero's or salsera's lips could be - is it useful for Salsa? Well possibly. The only drawback is the price. Can you afford it? And can you afford to take it out dancing? If you can answer yes to both of those then you have certain benefits:

Video
The video quality on the iPhone 3GS is VGA 640x480 30 frames per second - better than small youtube video quality. It does autofocus photographs, auto-light balance, and handles panning and motion fairly well (with the option to correct for motion shakiness afterwards through software on a computer). It's not Flip quality, but it does seem to suffere less distortion when panning it seems.

What does that look like? Here's a quick video, recording a youtube video to show you rough quality. Bear in mind that youtube actually compresses the actual recorded video.



You do a lesson, and then record the final runthrough demonstration, and then you've got that reminder video stored on your phone. You can share it, you can edit it, whatever.

There is great power to be able to archive lesson patterns, or insights, thoughts, or even just video your friends for feedback/encouragement/to show them how good they are. I know that Anthony at addicted2salsa has mentioned the iPhone before in several contexts (Shazam app to identify music, photos, storing a2s videos! Being his precious...)

Storing a back catalogue of audio & video podcasts

There is a decent amount of salsa on iTunes - e.g. Addicted2Salsa's HD video podcast - link to subscribe in iTunes here. That looks great on the iPhone, and iPod Touch.


I'll add the unlikely salsero link if I can find it. (Edit - this one and this one I think).

SatNav
It does decent GPS based Google Maps guidance to an event, with the option to get a TomTom application and charger/holder soon. Info here -



GPS
This is so cool, I'd watch the Engadget review here In particular, this video. You won't get lost.




Camera
The best camera, is the one you have with you. There are better picture taking phones out there. But, bear in mind, that the iPhone is the most popular handset model to upload pictures to Flickr for example - it's so easy to email, post to Flickr, MMS, or blog about pictures you've taken. It does good pictures, for a 3Megapixel camera. No camera flash here, but it's good.

Email, SMS
No more waiting, you can be being productive whilst you wait for your friends to arrive, and you can keep in touch with them
There will be more reasons, but for now, these are the ones off the top of my head!
For some more ideas about the video, have a look at this gallery here

Guided tour of the iPhone 3GS


More salsa posts here and some previous thoughts on an iPhone app.

iPhone web app, and sharing love forward

I wonder how others get their blog to get more traffic? I guess I need to post more, and better...

Anyhow, the iPhone app - saw salsamap.com just now - it's discontinued, which needs following up as to why - and the Google cache shows some promise as to someone's go at something that would be pretty nifty potentially for a salsero who's on the move.

Google www.salsamap.com, then click on the blue hyperlink cached version button

Salsa by map, by date and location, by list of events (calendar), by name of organiser. Put down as created as an entry on Dec 08 2006

http://www.afterfive.co.uk/maps/Salsa-links.html
http://www.5minutesite.com/browse/vpui0002021.php

Edit: http://www.salsamaps.com/ - Working, but "in beta", and seemingly another stopped project. Seems the opportunity is still there...

Sharing the love to folks

On another point, i've been combing through a lot of salsa and dance blogs over the weekend (fixing a computer, backing up and transferring Gigabytes of data needs a distraction!) and came across a great blog: http://atimetodance.wordpress.com

Having got several pages back, I found the post:

By the end of the calendar year (or so), I will send a tangible, physical gift to each of the first five people to comment here. The catch? Each person must make the same offer on her/his blog. [I myself am passing this on since I responded to morganlf's meme].

The rules:

1. Anyone may respond, whether I know you or not. However, you must have a blog of your own where you can pass along the same offer.

2. No members of my immediate family are eligible ’cause you’re getting holiday presents from me anyway.

So passing it on: A tangible physical gift to 5 people who add a comment. Heck - they'd be the 1st five to comment, so why not have a gift on standby!

Twittering dancers, salseros?

On a semi related note - Are there that many on twitter, or other similar networks? Surely twitter, and Loopt would be useful applications for a dance night out?