Nokia Chat is the latest escapee from the Nokia Beta Labs skunkworks. It is an Instant Messenger, obviously, but what can they possibly have come up with to distinguish it from the thousand+ other chat apps available for S60 phones? Answer - they have liberally doused it in GPS special sauce.
At first blush the app works like any other IM-type program - type your comments using the keypad and watch your conversation scroll up the screen of your handset - but, unlike your typical IM client, Nokia Chat can share your current real-world location via Nokia Maps.
You can quickly see the location of your Nokia-using pals and use the app to arrange a meet-up.
A clever feature allows you to set ‘landmarks’ (e.g. your house, your favourite pub, work, etc). When you happen to go near a landmark, Nokia Chat will broadcast this info to your friends so they can keep track of where you are.
It all sounds rather jolly but, as is so often the case with handset-specific apps, it does depend on all the people you want to talk to owning Nokia phones. Windows Mobile or Motorola RAZR owners are used to being social outcasts, but iPhone users will find this kind of exclusion a slap in the face.
It’s really annoying when companies make decisions like this. It is unlikely to get people to persuade their refusnik mates to join a handset monoculture - the only real outcome will be that practically nobody bothers to use what would otherwise be a really useful little app.
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.
