It all started with preparations for the Global M&E conference. As part of the preparations, i worked with a team of 2 others; one from Washington and one from Baltimore to decide and develop a mobile Data Collection activity that would be undertaken by the participants once they got here. This was a great activity for me. It means that i get to understand even more these platforms that i am always advocating to program staff. And so we made plans for 18 Mobile Devices, the use of EpiSurveyor and the use of a minimal MOH711A as the form to be programmed to the devices. While deciding on the phone models was easy enough, there was still the process of determining which were available in the Kenyan Market and whether Tablets would be included as part of the device mix. Eventually we decided to not have tablets and settled on the Nokia 6303. Great....Now came the trickier part; getting the approval from Finance. I couldn't get the approval immediately because several finance staff were on leave...with only 4 working days left. Anyhow, i finally got the approval on a Thursday (after reviewing a few more quotations) and preparation of the L.P.O. began. To cut the long story short, the L.P.O. was approved on Thursday afternoon, money wired to the provider's account but it was not until Saturday afternoon that we could obtain the devices. I had already been up many nights that week (and the previous) to develop the EpiSurveyor forms and all that remained was deploying the forms onto these Nokia 6303s. And so i got the SIM cards and airtime (using my own funds), installed them into the phones which i then configured for internet access. Not a hard task, but for 18 phones, it was ridiculously monotonous. I met the two folks i mentioned on Sunday, prepared for a presentation on the devices for the coming Tuesday, made a pretty decent presentation (i think!) yesterday and from what i hear, the participants just left for the field trip that involves data collection (we are not allowed to call it that, by the way) at 13 health faclities. I feel rather disappointed i can't go but i can't wait for the feedback! Should be interesting :P I don't think i'm done with the conference stuff, there are still a couple of internet woes and i'm helping out in that too....but i have to admit, this is all great.
Right, off to the tablet. Yap, you got me right. I got a tablet on Sunday! It took a lot of research on which device would be most cost effective, feature-filled and had a vibrant developer community and i finally settled on the Viewsonic GTablet. I have to admit that the viewing angle sucks but i'm just getting started with it. It's an Android 2.2 Froyo device with a 1Ghz Tegra 2 processor, 512 MB RAM, 16GB internal storage memory, 1.3MP camera, standard ports(USB, microUSB) that totally kicks ass! I am planning to install a custom ROM on it(Vegan-Tab) and get access to the Android Market for some similarly kick ass apps. It's amazing how just buying this device has catapulted me to a new world (of tablets...) which hopefully will turn out fun.
So a couple of things are pending (at work and personally). For some reason when i do more to get more off my work load, a set of newer activities all begging for attention pop-up! ha, i guess the work just never ends. As long as it's fun....
