That is, I am now mapping with the help of GPS traces. :-D I have been contributing since mid-2007 but all of my contributions are based on Yahoo! imagery and personal observation. But now that I am the custodian of a GPS mobile phone (the Sony Ericsson W760, touted as the first GPS-enabled Walkman) I am now able to record GPS traces and I have uploaded a bunch of them concentrated on places where there are new streets not seen in the Yahoo! satellite imagery.

"Proper" mapping via GPS. The first such place that I have mapped with the help of GPS is the Frontera Verde area (map link in this entry). Before, the roads I placed were an approximation, but I'm surprised to say that I've managed to map the major roads almost perfectly even without the help of GPS, save for the L-shaped unnamed street that I had corrected via my GPS trace (which I loaded into Merkaartor and before uploading it to OSM).

Another street that I added with the help of GPS is Palm Coast Avenue near the SM Mall of Asia.

The power of having GPS to do mapping has affected my driving habits. I now try to plan my trips to maximize unmapped areas, go around unmapped roundabouts at least once, and take detours, all of which are best exemplified by this GPS trace. :-P

The quest for a GPS logger. The quest to find a nice GPS logger for the phone is another "interesting" story altogether. The W760 has a pre-installed Sports Tracker software that could store GPX traces but I couldn't customize how often it stores a point. In tests I saw that it records about every 4 seconds, which is too infrequent for my tastes, so I went on a quest to find a good Mobile Java-based GPX logger. I sent an e-mail to the talk-ph mailing list and somebody suggested I try Mobile Trail Explorer. It wasn't good for me since it defaults to using an external GPS device via Bluetooth and forcing it to use the internal GPS (via these instructions and not at all intuitive) made the application hang the next time I opened it. So no MTE for me.

I tried a bunch of other applications with the help of OSM Wiki pages like Making Tracks with Homebrew-ware and Category:Java midlet and finally settled on TrekBuddy. One thing I like about it is that it doesn't arbitrarily accesses the Internet and two, I can pre-load OSM layers into it and I did just that via this handy online tool that generates the files that TrekBuddy uses to display maps.

I'm now a giddy OSMapper since. :-)