Trulia.com Crime Map

Trulia.com, the real estate web-site, has unveiled a new web site that shows a great interactive crime map for most US cities, including San Francisco. This is not the first online crime map out there, but this one has by far the best interface. It looks really good, is well designed, and it is very fast and responsive. You can zoom in from National level all the way to street level and get all kinds of detailed information about every single crime reported. You can also see trends by hour or day.

[Trulia.com/crime via gizmodo]

HTC Thunderbolt gets 26 Mbits/second!

Yep, 26 Mbits/s. That's the amazing download speed I was able to get on my friend's HTC Thunderbolt running on Verizon's 4G LTE network. We were at Rosamunde in San Francisco's Mission district, with four out of four bars of signal strength. The upload speed was 5 Mbits/s.

SFPark iPhone app shows Real-Time Parking Availability in San Francisco

As you may or may not know, San Francisco's SFPark Project has been installing state-of-the-art park-meters and sensors on the ground that can tell if a car is parked in the spot. This information is transmitted wirelessly to their central server. Now this information is available to everybody on-line on the sfpark.org website, or with the SFPark iPhone app. It displays a map showing each street block color-coded depending on the approximate number of spots available.

Sprint finally turns on 4G in San Francisco

At last, I can use the ridiculously superior speeds of the 4G network on my HTC EVO! Sprint turned on the service in San Francisco on December 28th, but for some reason it took a few days before was actually able to connect. I did some tests and was able to consistently get from 8 to 11 Mb/s download speeds in the Mission (Valencia/Mission streets, from 18th to 25th streets).

That's outside in the streets, tho. Inside buildings, the signal strength is very weak and i am lucky if i get 3 Mb/s, when i get a connection at all. So indoors, it usually falls back on 3G. WiMax technology, sprint's choice for its 4G network, is notorious for having poor indoor coverage. Also the coverage map shows quite a few blind spots in the City.

There are technological solutions out there to address these issues, but they are expensive for operators. Lets hope Sprint will be willing to foot the bill and improve coverage in the future.

Sprint 4G Coverage in SF

So now, i actually have a faster internet connection on my phone than on my DSL at home... Isn't that great? ;)