It’s still early days for GPS mobiles, in terms of figuring out exactly how mapping applications can make use of GPS combined with a mobile phone’s data connection. However, Nokia is certainly bullish about the prospects for the area, judging by comments from CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo at the company’s annual shareholder meeting: ”We expect to ship about 35 million GPS-enabled Nokia devices in 2008, which is equal to the entire GPS device market in 2007,” he said, expressing similar confidence about the company’s decision to buy navigation firm Navteq. “When we look at it with the eyes we have now, when regarding pedestrian navigation, map services, digital maps, we are even more excited about the opportunities than when making the decision.” It’s good news, since 35 million phones is a decent base for GPS-related services to target, meaning that if you own one of these handsets, chances are more developers are working on innovative applications making use of the technology. GPS and social networking is one of the areas I’m most interested in going forward, along with geotagging photos. Of course, just because you own a Nokia handset doesn’t mean you’ll want to use its GPS for Nokia’s own mapping and sharing services, so we’ll have to see how they tie in with other companies’ services (for example Google Maps and Flickr). (via Planet Cell Phone)
Tag Archive for 'gps'
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.
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.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to post about Nokia Beta Labs without using the word ‘boffins’ in the opening sentence.
Nokia Location Tagger is a new release from the Beta Labs - a simple add-on to ’selected’ Nokia phones running S60 3rd Edition that allows you to geotag photos with GPS data.
Geotagging in this context just means finding the GPS coordinates for your location when you take a photo, and then recording those coordinates in the EXIF data associated with that photo. EXIF data is readable by a wide variety of software as well as photo sharing sites like Flickr and Picasa. These apps can use geotag data to organise your photos by location or display them using Google Maps, etc.
As apps go it is pretty underwhelming (you either need geotagging or you don’t, really) but there is an interesting paragraph in this blog post, announcing the app, which suggests that geotagging is to become a standard part of all future Nokia cameraphones. Is this part of a wider geolocation strategy by the wily Finns? Certainly, their Lifeblog service could make good use of it…
GPSed is billed as ‘a location based service for trip tracking’. What this means in practice is another GPS-aware mobile app that connects to a web service.
There are versions of the app for Symbian, Windows Mobile/Pocket PC, Blackberry, Palm OS and Java that can work with either built in or external GOS units to track your movements in real time, updating a database on the GPSed site and displaying your progress via Google Maps.
In other words, this is Nokia Sports Tracker, but with the emphasis on travel and geo-blogging, rather than sweaty trainers and number crunching performance stats.
Once you have recorded your ‘tracks’ the site makes it easy to share them with family and friends and will even offer a real-time view of your position on the map.
GPSed also provide a windows photo album that associates photos with geo-data and displays them with a nice ‘pin board’ metaphor via Google Earth. This is currently offline-only but there are apparently plans to let users share geotagged photos via the GPSed site.
Sony Ericsson’s spanking new Cybershot phone – the Kxxx – emerges. No, we don’t mean it’s a particularly saucy handset, it’s just that no-one’s quite sure what it’s called.
Anyway, the new handset, which is apparently for real, was unveiled on Chinese website pconline.cn (so maybe it’s a leak from a Sony Ericsson factory?).
What is apparently true is that it looks like a K800-range Cybershot with bright blue casing. It does carry a three-megapixel camera (not five-megapixel?!?) with a dual-LED flash.
So what? We hear you say… a Cybershot phone with no five-megapixel camera? Bear with us. This beauty features a built-in GPS receiver with Google Maps, Favourite Places and more – just like a Nokia N95 8GB.
Imagine – a Cybershot phone which lets you automatically update your location when uploading pictures to your blog!
It might be lacking a top-notch camera, but the GPS certainly is an intriguing addition to Sony Ericsson’s line-up-.
You can see more pictures here.
When we covered Nokia’s Sports Tracker last year we mentioned rumours of forthcoming integration with other web services. The first of these, a Facebook applet, has entered Beta.
Sports Tracker is a GPS-enabled app that logs your progress during training runs and lets you plot your progress on Google Maps as well as analyze data using various graphs and an exercise diary.
Aspiring athletes can embed the widget in their Facebook profiles so that their friends can get regular updates on how little exercise they are actually doing.
Cynicism aside, this could be a good way to force you into sticking to that exercise-based new year’s resolution that you rashly announced to everyone at the party and then swiftly regretted when you realised we were in for a month of freezing rain.
Hold the front page! Yahoo! has released a new version of its Go! on-device portal for apps and services on your handset.
Seriously though, the already quite handy and easy to use downloadable portal has been given a re-fresh to make it even easier to use.
The last version offered map and routing services linked into a handset’s built-on GPS (if the handset is GPS-enabled anyway).
The new version (3.0) has apparently got improved email handling, more news services, satellite-generated maps and live traffic updates. All in one simple Java download. Bonus.
You can get it by going to get.go.yahoo.com on your smartphone’s browser and downloading it. Go on, you know you want to…
Vodafone’s 2007-2008 Symbian roadmap has been leaked and while we already know about the 2007 releases, more interesting is the two new Nokia handsets in Vodafone’s plans.
has show two new Nokia devices – the Liam and the Dora, scheduled for launch in Q2 this year. Both have built-in Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA and 3.2-megapixel cameras. But they do have differences…
The Liam is a QWERTY device with a 2.4-inch screen and is smaller and slimmer than the Nokia E61, which it’s going to replace. Meanwhile the slider Dora succeeds the Nokia E65, with a 2.4-inch screen and quad-band connectivity.
The devices sound (and look) pretty interesting but really, the names! Please Vodafone or Nokia, sort them out before you release these handsets – who’d want a handset called a ‘Dora’?
Sony Ericsson’s gone new-handset-crazy at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.
First up is the W760 Walkman phone with features coming out of its ears, starting with a 3.2-megapixel camera. Music features include stereo speakers, TrackID and SensMe technology to match your music with your mood, and the Active Speaker MAS-100.
It’s not the most exciting the name but the MAS-100 is one of the most intriguing accessories we’ve seen in a long time. It is a protective case for your phone which also includes handy speakers and a FM radio antenna.
It sounds like a cool device, and we haven’t even mentioned the GPS features. With built-in Wayfinder Navigation (lets you search over 20 million points of interest around the Globe) and Google Maps built-in.
And that’s not all… Continue reading ‘Sony Ericsson crams everything into new W760 Walkman phone’
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