I have been mapping my hometown (Viña del Mar, Chile) for the last couple of weeks. It is a medium size metropolitan area with about eight hundred thousand people living on it, and I am the first one mapping the city in OSM!!!

Until today I did it with a GPS/Bluetooth gadget and my laptop running Navit (with logging configured in the configuration xml file) over Ubuntu 7.10 (It was a real PITS since the resulting gpx files didn't had the right sintax for OSM so I had to worked them to add a time tag, also I was limited to the laptop battery life), but today I found a really nice piece of free software for my Blackberry 8100. It is called bbTracker (http://www.bbtracker.org/). Once it is installed in your smartphone you have to configure it to connect to your Bluetooth GPS (It is not included with your BB but it's quite cheap, probably less than 50 dollars), and you start making tracks (showing you the advances in the screen of the BB), and export those tracks in a gpx file, fully compatible with OSM :) You can configure it to save the files in a folder of your SD card (I am saving it in the Video folder and works flawlessly) and then you can extract all your tracks with your preferred BB management software or a card reader (I just connect the BB with a USB cable and see it as an external drive).

Conclusion, no more laptops in the car (bulky, with the risk of being robed, with the risk of damaging the HD with the jumps, battery life limits, etc.), just my BlackBerry and the GPS/Bluetooth gadget that is even smaller than the smartphone.

Cheers