Rather than hijack into the "survival tablet" thread, I would like to inquire as to a good phone to acquire, considering that it will be used outdoors a lot, and potentially for 'survival" purposes. I am sure I will make good use of the camera function, and probably GPS as well. A definite fan and long time committed user of paper maps, it might as well be time to consider the electronic versions.

As long as I am asking, what apps would you recommend?

The reason I am asking is that I found that my Galaxy SIII did not respond well to a salt water dunking - it doesn't want to take pictures anymore.

I find the comparison of a smartphone to a multitool very appropriate, and I am a fan of MT's.

Thanks in advance for your responses and for helping to drag me kicking and screaming into the expanding electronic age...

My Galaxy SIII had terrible battery life, even when it was only on stand-by. I loved the phone but wouldn't recommend it, especially as a survival or emergency phone, based solely on that experience.

One thing to keep in mind, that as technology advances, smartphones become obsolete pretty quickly. I have an older Android phone. I used to have some pretty good apps on it. But the time came, as it always seems to, when the phone started acting erratically and I had to do a factory reset. Then when I went to reload my favorite apps, I found that most of them had been updated over the years to newer versions - and those newer versions would not run on my old phone. I was not able to find the older app versions that would run on my phone in most cases.

So plan on backing up everything on your phone for a LOCAL restore later. Make sure you get a smartphone that can handle a complete LOCAL restore of all your apps and their data. Don't be foolish like I was and think you can just re-download the apps from the web again at some later date. For one, the web may be gone, but even if it's still there, you can still be in trouble, like I was.

You probably know this... but FWIW: don't count on the phone's GPS if you don't have data or wifi connection. I'm not aware of any of them that actually communicate with the satellites on their own, like a dedicated GPS.

There are a lot of choices. From a wilderness use point of view, the case you put the phone in may be more important than the phone you decide to buy. Count on using the phone sparingly and carrying the means to charge it with you. Make appropriate configuration changes to improve battery life -- no matter what phone you have, if you're using "push" notifications from social media apps, battery life won't be great.

There are bad guys in the world who use nefarious means to compromise mobile devices. Mobile antivirus is of very limited utility against these threats. Look for a mobile device manufacturer with a good record of updating software to close known vulnerabilities. Install apps only from reputable developers.

• Turn backlight to minimum "on" duration. When you're done using the device, manually turn off the backlight immediately rather than waiting for it to time out and turn itself off. Turn backlight intensity to minimum brightness. You can manually change these on an as needed basis.
• Turn off all radio - WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G and 4G. This will isolate you from the internet. But you can turn it on manually if and when you require it.
• If you enable an email app, set it to NOT automatically retrieve emails. Again, you should instigate this manually if and when you need it.
• Don't load games on it - many of these draw revenue from ads, and will go out in the background and try to retrieve new ads to display, even when you're not running the game. Same thing from some non-game apps as well. Basically, load a minimum number of apps that you actually need. And try to stay away from apps that like to phone home to the mothership.

This is an urban legend, and not correct. While some of the very early smartphones needed a cell connection to compute a location, more up to date models are fully capable of finding your position completely independent of cell connection.

I live in Alaska, where cell coverage is spotty to non existent once you get out of town. I'm currently using an iphone 4 (hardly the latest model), and I have used it many times to get a GPS fix while out of cell range. On several occasions while out of cell range, just for fun I have taken simultaneous readings with both my iphone and my Garmin GPS. The iphone is always spot on with the Garmin.

Keep in mind that with some devices the GPS receiver gets turned off in Airplane mode -- this is something to figure out before you need to. But the GPS function is a separate chip, receiver and antenna for all modern smartphones that I know of. Wifi and mobile connections, when available, can improve the speed of a fix.

My well rounded final choice is Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

1. It has removable battery - so you can stock on easily replaceable spares. And you can recharge them separately by various means while using the phone disconnected from the charger (must have option).

2. It has T-flash (Micro SD) slot. So you can carry multiple tiny memory cards with maps, music, books, movies, games, etc and make them available on the phone only when needed. I.o.w. you are not limited by the phone's internal storage (must have option)

3. Note has a decent stylus for hand writing, drawing, sketching, and precise manipulation of the graphical interfaceces elements. It replaces a pencil and a notepad in 90% of cases when those are needed (must have option to me, as I'm drawing plans and schematics a lot)

4. Has a decent camera (not the best possible, but very good, perfectly adequate for many daily survival purposes).

5. The screen is large, bright, and sharp - great for all mapping purposes, but still not big enough to make the phone as cumbersome as even 8" tablets.

6. Samsung is the king of various external sensors integrated.

7. OLED screen - great outdoors visibility even in the direct sun (consumes more power, yes, but you will have to take care of that in an ultimate way anyway) The OLED screen is a must have feature for me, as I need a completely black screen without any back light bleeding (All the TFT screens are suffering from) for the maximal darkness adaptation (serious astronomy, you know).

8. The OtterBox rugged cases are readily available for this top of the line model (as well as some other cases, including watertight and externally attaching battery options). A must have feature, as there are only 2-3 really trusted rugged external cases makers on the market to date. Also such wrap around cases are easily modifiable with a neck/hand lanyard and have a sturdy belt clip option.

The newer model, the Note 4 is also good, but it has a fingerprint sensor on the back, which makes it more vulnerable to damage and leakage (as the phone is often resting on some surface, plus - all rugged cases had to provide an opening in the back plate for that - another structurally weak point), but that's actually a minor drawback. The Note 5 and the upcoming 6 are no go, as they are sadly lacking the 1 and 2 features.

Regarding the power saving - the fastest way is to trigger the Airplane mode which is effectively blocking all of the communication chips and quite fast to switch back and forth. Also I made sure my desktop and apps have the darkest color themes possible (savings are for OLED screens only). Even my web browser has a night mode with inversed colors forcefully applied to any pages displayed. But if you carry a fully charged spare battery it's just a matter of 1 minute to replace it when low during the day. Under the heaviest use (watching HD movies nonstop over the WiFi with BT earphones) it goes from 100% to 5% in 4 hours. But I've been using it for GPS navigation including the constant track recording (also making surround images and short videos on the go) on an unfamiliar trail once for slightly over 8 hours in a row, and got around 30% power left on return.

And yep, the phone GPS is 100% functional without any networks around.

Regarding the apps, there are many. For the field navigation I love the OSMAnd (offline and online maps). I'll compile the list of what I'm using and how a bit later.

I am looking to get a Koycera Torque S-701

http://www.expansys.com/kyocera-torque-kc-s701-black-279557/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKPbUm6PyS4

The Bear Grylls' phone?
(http://www.kyoceramobilephone.com/en/s701/)

Last week I and a group of friends backpacked the Solitario out at Big Bend Ranch State Park, TX. I used my cheap android phone gps along with a map I georeferenced on Maprika app. There is no coverage out there and the phone was put in airplane mode. It kept me found the entire trip.

Looks a lot like my Brigadier
http://www.kyoceramobile.com/brigadier/


I've had it for about 1.5 years and its been tested. My son played minecraft in the water in a creek in WV. I dropped it in the water on VA beach and had to kick around with my feet until I felt it.

The only Android "device" I have is not a phone but instead a tablet
This very capable tablet was way less pricey than my iPhone (and the Moto Turbo 2 I tried to like) and the GPS receiver is totally independent of other systems. I bought this for a specific ongoing project, but as long as it's available I decided to load it up -- apps are cheap enough.

Point is, why put up with a small cell-phone display when you can have one a little bigger that is much more capable -- the lines of text are longer and maps cover more area. Survival doesn't mean you need to suffer with a tiny display.

Just sayin'

Thats kind of what I did. I have the smallish 4.5" phone which fits in my pocket then an 8" tablet for when I need/want a bigger screen.
We actually have 4 tablets now, one for each family member. When my son kept getting told by a teacher we needed an ipad I gave him the prices of our 4 vs the ipad and so he could see that we could have one tablet for each of the 4 of us or one ipad that we all share and he decided to keep his

Not just maps too, you can use OpenDocumentViewer or AndrOpenOffice for offline editing. I run my own sync server so I'm not dependent on someone elses cloud or even on the internet, since I can sync via my local network.

I have tried to explain that already. The smaller the device the easier it to EDC and protect. The screen size does not matter much for a personal use, only its resolution. The map coverage on HD tab and on HD phone is exactly the same. I believe that 5.5" is ideal, as it provides usable onscreen keyboard already, but still perfectly pocketable device. Get reading glasses (the thin optics, I've recommended, is great because you can attach them right to the phone's back), and your screen size will be perceived as a huge HD tv screen or computer monitor. I have a tablet as well, galaxy note 10.1 (also with the Vacom stylus, as I would never buy anything without it ever) and I love it, however, 99% of the time I'm using the phone, while the tab is sitting on the charger nearby. Because there is no difference in capabilities at all, but the phone is much lighter and easier to hold in one hand.

That's an opinion. For older eyes, a larger display makes things visible without optics.

I take my glasses OFF for viewing small things up close. One thing about being severely nearsighted - you can see really well from about 6 inches away without your glasses. Of course your window of good sight only ranges from about 5 inches to 7 inches from your face,then you need your glasses back. That's pretty decent to see a phone up close, a tablet gets harder (being larger, you have to move it around to hit the sweet spot). So badly nearsighted people probably don't have to add optics, they just take the existing ones away. But it depends on just how nearsighted you are.

Thanks, my point exactly. I'm far-sighted; I need 1.25 reading glasses at arms length, 1.75 at my elbow. Close-in without readers, I need to blow up my iPhone display to the point that I have a very narrow view and at arms length I see no detail. So there you are, there isn't a cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all solution.

I don't understand why you cannot get +2.50 reading glasses and use your screen even closer to the eyes, I'm using +2.0.

The point haertig has expressed is that if you are nearsighted already - you need no reading glasses at all to have a huge crisp screen on a physically small device.

Or, we can have different solutions to the same problem. The phone I carry is an iPhone so we are starting with different solutions. There are advantages in some Android apps though, but I'm not going to get a 5.5" display when I can have 8".

The PDA model does not matter for the screen's virtual size. As far as I understand (let's say, assuming you are reading the forum on it), you don't want to use reading glasses, so you have to hold a PDA at the arm's length to focus on the screen better, but not perfectly, thus needing to increase the page zoom in order to have a larger recognizable font size, what is clipping the content of the page, thus asking for a physically larger screen to reduce the effect?...

I would rather carry the glasses than suffer like that. They are less than a buck off eBay (I bought 3 pairs once, +1.5, +2, +2.5 in a large Pilot style framing). Great for tinkering with micro electronics and for reading the phone in the bed.

Another cheap but precious smartphone gadget slimming down my EDC kit:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/391333526724 It makes possible to connect any regular USB memory stick or some USB devices (like mouse or keyboard) to your Android Smartphone and has a minimal physically possible size. It's so thin, that I'm carrying it in the camera lens' hole of my phone belt clip between two pieces of tape. The regularly sized OTG piece is going off my keychain forever!

Nice.

For those with an iPhone/iPad a good looking article and collection of smartphone apps: http://prepared-housewives.com/emergency-apps-that-might-just-save-your-life/

By the way, I've got another little EDC wonder of eBay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/121876066748


In short, it's a blue tooth (BT) tag, connecting to your android phone. The software iTracing is really immature, but I'm using it with the community made version (iTracing2 instead to integrate with the Tasker app, which I'm using for every phone automation ideas. It allows:

1. Use the tag as a wireless button (camera shutter, register your GPS fix, launch an app, turn on a siren, etc). It supports single and double click events, as well as the long click, which turns the tag on and off.

2. Use the tag as a remote noise maker (search for your keys in the room by pressing a button on the phone, so the tag attached to your keys starts beeping loud; it's also blinking with a small blue led).

3. Detect if the tag is out of range or how far it is from your phone. Basically it just monitors the BT signal strength and you can set an event on a certain % of that signal, to replicate a sort of "geo fence" feature, like "turn on the alarm if the tag, attached to your bag is out of range", so you don't forget it in the bus or on a bench. In conjunction with the GPS on your phone, the smart enough app will associate the last location the tag was visible with the BT radio low signal, so you can see that last location on the map if you've missed the alarm by accident (or had to keep the volume down for a reason).

Nice toy to play with for under $2 shipped. Some smart aces are selling the same for $20 and deleting my sarcastic comments on their web pages I can easily see it rigged for the wire perimeter alarm triggering in the camp as its range is around 75'.