This may have been obvious from the amount of location-aware apps that have been gushing out of Nokia Beta Labs lately, but Nokia have decided that GPS is where it’s at (and they have the coordinates to prove it). Accordingly, by 2012 over 50% of its handsets will have GPS receivers built in.
Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s head of location-based activities, said in an interview with Reuters that “We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year and many more location-enabled phones that use cell-towers to orient themselves on the map. You will see few ‘E’ or ‘N’ Series phones without GPS.”
So, does this mean that in the next couple of years Nokia expects GPS to be cheap enough to stuff into lower-end handsets, or are they just being optimistic about their smartphones taking off in the mass market? Given that they are also putting a lot of development time and money into low-end ‘third world’ phones, it would seem to be the latter. Great news, unless they expect us all to pay smartphone prices.
Location based information service WHERE has launched a client for Nokia smartphones.
WHERE uses the inbuilt GPS receiver to pinpoint your location and offers over 60 widgets that identify local services and ’stuff’ like restaurants, petrol stations, landmarks and even local weather and earthquakes.
WHERE also includes the mobile friend finding widget BuddyBeacon. BuddyBeacon shows the location of any friends nearby and lets you share your location via social networking sites like Facebook.
The app is a free download for Nokia N95 8GB, Nokia N95 and Nokia N82 phones.
Developers are getting their teeth into Google’s new Android mobile platform, and the results promise to be a cut above most of the mobile applications we’ve seen before. Take Enkin as an example: it’s a GPS navigation application that blends live video, 3D graphics and sundry Web 2.0 services.
It’s been developed by Rafael Spring and Max Braun, two German students entering the Google Android Developer Challenge. The app has three modes: a topdown 2D map viewer, a Google Earth style 3D landscape, and a live video mode. Meanwhile, much of the UI for the application is based around rolling and tilting your mobile phone. Accelerometer-tastic!
So, it’s a work in progress for now, with no commercial launch date in mind. But judging by the demonstration video on the Enkin site, it deserves to be picked up by someone for a big commercial push once Android handsets are available.
(via Wireless Watch Japan)
A company called 3DVU which specializes in 3D image navigation and location services has announced that it is teaming up with Orange to launch a new service called Navi2Go on Windows Mobile phones.
As you have probably already guessed, Navi2Go is a navigation application but the main selling point here is that all of the data is served up in an impressively flashy interface where the area you are navigating is recreated in luscious 3D on your handset. Apparently you will be able to travel over the UK in its entirety with high resolution aerial imagery and high-precision terrain elevation in a 3D bird-eye-view.
So basically what we are talking about here is an application that does what Google Earth does, but on a mobile and with the the added benefit of GPS showing you exactly where you are. Very clever and for directionless people like me (they call me the anti-compass) a very helpful too. It had better be however as the service is subscription based though it is available now for a four month introductory price of £15 at the Orange Shop under the travel section.
Mobile social networking is building up a head of steam, although it has to be said that much of the hype is focused on the mobile efforts of the big Web firms like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo, despite the fact that a lot of the innovation is coming from mobile startups.
iPhone offers an opportunity for the latter to grab some of those column inches. Influential tech blogger Michael Arrington is already on the case, with an enthusiastic post about an unnamed startup working on a social networking app for iPhone:
“It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.”
It apparently uses the iPhone’s built-in triangulation tech to identify nearby users, in the absence of GPS. Arrington also suggests that the startup has found a way around the fact that native iPhone apps won’t be able to run in the background when you’re using an iPhone. He’s not allowed to say how though. The shots above are mockups, apparently. Thoughts?
Location-based mobile services have been around for donkey’s years, without ever threatening to actually become popular. But that’s changing, mainly because the technology is improving, more capable handsets are out there, and companies are focusing on making LBS services you’d actually want to use.
Analyst Berg Insight thinks this is leading to something of a bonanza. In fact, it predicts that more than 100 million Europeans will use location based services by 2012, with the most popular being mapping, navigation and search, although social networking and tracking will also grow between now and then. Analyst André Malm explains:
“All the pieces needed for successful LBS are more or less in place now. GPS is about to become a standard feature in mass-market handsets which are highly advanced and support third party applications. Many will try and a few players will most likely succeed in creating location-enabled mobile applications that will have the same impact on the mobile industry as MySpace and Facebook had on the Internet.”
However, he’s less bullish about whether all this LBS activity will translate into actual revenues for the companies providing it, suggesting that advertising will play a big role, but it’s still early days in the mobile advertising market.
(via Slashphone)
We have looked at GeoTagging - tagging your photos with GPS data to mark where they were taken - before on Pocket Picks. The most notable implementation to date on Nokia S60 phones has been Nokia Beta Labs’ own Nokia Location Tagger.
While that was a creditable attempt, its main problem is that it is a standalone application. Nobody is going to come out and claim that the camera software most Nokia phones is anything to write home about, but it is pretty comprehensive and - most importantly - it is what most users are familiar with.
Well done, then, to ADnota GeoTag for S60 3rd Edition phones. Adnota integrates into the existing photo software and adds tags in EXIF format.
The app is freeware and derived from a (shareware) app called Adnota Album - which features a few more tricks and useful tools.
If you use Facebook you are presumably no stranger to having your personal details plastered all over the internet, so why not take it a step further and start telling all your FB ‘friends’ exactly where you are at all times?
FindMe lets you do just that. Using as similar cell-tower triangulation technique to Google Maps for Mobile, FindMe lets you give labels to physical locations like ‘Work’, ‘Dave’s House’ or ‘Tescos’. Whenever you (or rather, your phone) go back to those places, FindMe will quietly update your Facebook status line with an appropriate message.
For you non-Facebookers, a Status Line is a one-line descripton of what you are up to, e.g. “Stuart is listening to La Traviata and savouring a vintage port” or, more likely, “Stuart is in Tescos”.
Should you want to stop telling MI5 your exact whereabouts for a while, you can ‘Go Dark’ (e.g. stop FindMe updating for a bit).
FindMe is freeware, available for Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
Trekking around the the backwaters of the world and purchasing embarrassing ethnic hats in faraway climes is set to be that much easier with the announcement of Rough Guides Mobile for Intel-based Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).
Although we haven’t seen many MIDs in the wild, Intel assure us that they will be everywhere in short order, competing with similar handheld devices like the Nokia N810 and Sony Mylo.
Rough Guides Mobile is an interactive, location-aware version of the popular backpacker’s guidebooks. It provides information on over 200 cities in 33 European countries.
Users can search for points of interest and use any GPS functionality available to the MID to access location-appropriate information such as guide books, restaurant and hotel reviews and streetmaps.
The developers, Creativity Software, say that the new app will offer the ability to Geotag photos and link them to your journey as well as submit your own ratings for local attractions.
Phonemakers have been making phones with navigation features for a while, so we suppose it makes sense for navigation companies to start adding phone features to satnavs. Thus Garmin was sort of showing off its nüvifone at the Mobile World Congress. We say ’sort of’ because it didn’t have any working models available for handling - the pictured devices were kept under perspex.
Still, you get the picture.
The nüvifone (please note the umlaut) is designed to sit neatly in your car and tell you where to go while linking into mobile data services such as Google to help you find the sort of restaurant or hotel you’re interested in. And then the babysitter can ring you while you’re on your starters to let you know Jack’s been sick and she can’t find Kylie.
Yeah, we’re just being mean.
It looks a fairly smooth device. Offering quad band/3.5G (GSM/GPRS/HSDPA), the phone also comes with wi-fi features, a 3.5 inch touchscreen, Bluetooth 2.0, a 3MP camera and provides for web browsing, email, IM and SMS, and links into Garmin’s Online platform too.
More images after the break.
Continue reading ‘Finding our way with Garmin’s nuvifone’
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