GPS pokes new peepholes into mobile screens

(CNN) -- Very soon, the most common phrase transiting through mobile phone networks will no longer be "Where are you?" but "I see you."

While satellite navigation via Global Positioning System (GPS) have been helping earthbound humans to visualize and plot everything from U.S. military movements to lost hikers since the 1970s, GPS and other mobile location-based services (LBS) have only recently begun to infiltrate our personal handsets.

"Many phone companies offer a cell-based location system," says Lawrence Cheung, principal consultant of the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC).

"The system works by locating the strongest nearby cell signals that are visible by the device's antenna, which can determine its position with an accuracy of around 200 meters. Hong Kong has about 1,500 cell towers."

Coordinating through the concrete jungle

Location technologies such as Cell-ID and WiFi are especially precious in dense urban areas like Hong Kong's Nathan Road -- where high-rise buildings often block satellites' highly precise "Sky Line of Sight," but where WiFi and cell towers are ubiquitous.

A few mobile-phone makers, including Samsung and Nokia in Asia, as well as Garmin in Europe and Apple's new 3G iPhone, already feature Assisted GPS, which combines several location-based technologies to offer faster, more flexible services such as dynamic maps and photo geo-tagging.

On the entertainment side, the agency Area/code has devised a number of quirky mobile location-based games involving GPS telemetry, Wi-Fi positioning, camera phones, semacodes, multi-players, and even live sharks with GPS units attached to their fins.

Mobile sweepstakes startup Limbo has set a precedent for advertising on mobile phones, so it won't be long before GPS is added to the equation, targeting the ads to each potential customer's specific location.

Meanwhile a handful of startups such as Telenav, WaveMarket and Brightkite have attempted to conquer the mobile market with their own LBS, focusing on dynamic, talking GPS navigation and extending their services to locating family, friends and resources.

Sat-nav meets soc-net

Among these companies offering to transform our mobile device into a "social compass," Loopt is one of the most established, with reportedly hundreds of thousands of registered users.

Part of Loopt's success is due to its wide support for 65 different handsets and its partnership with six mobile-phone carriers, as well as its availability as an add-on in Facebook -- not to mention a deal with CBS to launch location-based advertising.

CEO and co-founder Sam Altman says he came up with the idea for Loopt when he walked out of class one day at Stanford University and realized everyone was calling or texting their friends to see where they were.
Today, Altman observes, "The number of friends really varies by user. Some only share with their five closest friends, while others are comfortable with a larger group. I have over 45 Loopt friends and also share my Loopt location information on other services like Facebook."

If having that many "friends" knowing exactly where you are at any given moment may sound scary to some, Loopt assures its constituency that it offers "the most advanced privacy settings ever built for a location service."

When asked to elaborate, Altman insists, "Loopt works with leading mobile, social networking, and online privacy and security organizations such as the Center for Democracy & Technology, Family Online Safety Institute and the Internet Safety Task Force among others. Loopt is also TRUSTe certified."

As to the iPhone, for which Loopt support is imminent, Altman beams: "The iPhone SDK tool is amazing. In two months, we were able to make the best version of Loopt we've ever created. It's taken us nearly a year to create other versions of our software."

In addition to Loopt, which promises to be a free download from Apple's opening-soon App Store, Polar Bear has created an application to let us shoot video with the 3G iPhone, making geo-tagging all the more relevant.

Cool things you can do with GPS

HKPC's Cheung identifies five distinct layers of GPS application: "Layer 1 is location -- Where am I? Layer 2 is the road map -- How do I get there? Layer 3 is value-added services such as tourist attractions, restaurants or other localized resources and information. Layer 4 is advertising. Layer 5 is dynamic navigation based on current conditions, such as weather, traffic or news."

In the case of this year's Beijing Olympics, GPS will be used to generate graphics that show where each boat is in relation to its competitors, as well as monitor the progress of individual boats in rowing and canoeing. Likewise, it will allow spectators to see exactly how far marathon frontrunners have to go to the finish line.

In Japan, Honda recently launched a premium members-only service that automatically downloads local crime figures to drivers' GPS units, in order to provide them with an educated guess on whether or not it's a good idea to park in that spot.

In a more eco-friendly initiative, Australia's Lismore Council will launch in July the country's fourth "natural burial site," featuring biodegradable coffins that can be buried deep in the outback at a spot personally chosen by family members and precisely located by its GPS coordinates.

And mobile social networking isn't just for humans. ZebraNet equips zebras with spiffy white GPS-enabled collars that sample their location every eight minutes and allow peer-to-peer data swapping between friends.

Of course, the information gathered is then sent back to a human research team led by Princeton University's Daniel Rubenstein, who is more interested in studying the endangered Grevy's zebras' grazing habits than what they think of each other's neckwear.

GPS has even inspired hypothetical amateur "position art," as megalomanically marketed by "Stavros and his Nokia N82," and only slightly more realistically evoked by Swedish design student Erik Nordenankar, who would have dispatched via DHL a GPS unit on a 110,664-km, 55-day journey spanning six continents and 62 countries, in order to create "the world's biggest drawing" in the form of a self-portrait.

But even if the two above-mentioned artworks belong to the realm of fiction, our progressing level of civilian GPS accessibility suggests that it may not be long before fantasy meets feasibility.

Do we Really Need a Zune Phone?

[What do you think? Is this what we really need? (Artist Concept)]

There is a bit speculation going around the Interweb as of late that Microsoft is hard at work on a Zune based phone, or ZunePhone if you want to call it what all the cool kids are calling it. In a recent memo making the rounds at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying the following:

"In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones—providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences."


After reading this memo I did what any fan of technology would do - I ran to my nearest window to get a glimpse of the pigs flying because Microsoft is finally starting to take an Apple-like approach to things by taking more control with hardware vendors to provide a "complete experiences with absolutely no compromises" for their end user. While I applaud Microsoft for taking that first step in hopefully stopping the hardware vendors from providing us with sub-par systems cluttered with excessive junk that we will never need or use on both the Desktop and mobile arena, you have to stop and ask yourself two questions:

Why the heck has it taken so long for Microsoft to step in to ensure a better user experience?
How angry are all the hardware vendors going to be over this news?

To be honest, I'm not really even that concerned about how angry or upset Microsoft's partners would be about something like this. This is mostly because these vendors are a large part of the reason why things are not as great as they could be. With the exception of HTC my personal opinion is that the majority of Windows Mobile handset makers just 'don't get it'. Looking back over the last few years of handset releases no carrier has really gone out of their way like HTC has to bring us a truly great mobile experience. Sure Samsung dipped its toes in the water with their Samsung Blackjack variant with the pretty and WM 6.1ish nifty homescreen, but unless you wanted to install a cooked ROM onto your device there was no chance that we would see this hint of what Windows Mobile could be in any other Samsung Blackjack out there in the wild and with Samsung's recent releases of Windows Mobile handsets you probably could never tell that there was a creative bone in their bodies at all!

This is incredibly annoying as some of my biggest complaints as an end user has always been the sheer lack of anything pretty to look at on our devices. Take for instance one of my biggest pet peeves with my Smartphone - super tiny contact images that would make Ray Palmer proud. According to Microsoft they left the ability for the handset makers to go in and tweak these to their liking as with almost everything else on the operating system but unfortunately no one ever took advantage of it. Instead what we received for years on end was the comforting knowledge in knowing that each company was just going to point the finger at the other and no one would take responsibility for leaving us with this horrible case of the uglies.

This one reason alone is why I have stated many times that if Microsoft was truly serious about competing on this new mobile plane, one where in the past years consumers have shown us that they wanted smartphone like features in user friendly packages, Microsoft would have to take complete control of their mobile operating system. They would have to control every aspect from hardware design to software design. It is not like we're still living in the days of Windows 95. Microsoft has shown us in the past that when it comes to making things pleasant to look at they are not as inept as they once were. Take the Zune and Windows Media Center for instance. Both products are some of the most ascetically pleasing releases Microsoft has ever had. It is one of the benefits to having pockets as large as Microsoft. If you lack a skill such as design then go out and buy that skill!

So that finally brings us to where we are now. Everyone seems to be convinced that Microsoft's recent memo about taking full control of the hardware and software will lead to the release of a Zune based handset and it probably could. My honest opinion is that as much as I would love to see Microsoft release a device such as this, it would just be way to confusing to the market place and would probably frustrate customers instead of making them happy be giving them what they want. I mean think about, do we really need a fourth Windows Mobile SKU?!

I will be the first person to admit that when it comes to Windows Mobile we definitely need a change. However creating an offset version of it to address just a tiny fraction of what is wrong with the OS is not really the way to go. Let's face it, at the heart of the matter Windows Mobile is a broken experience. It is hands down my favorite mobile operating system out there, but it could be way better. Instead of just putting a band-aid on problem and hoping that everything will be okay, I would just love to see Microsoft tear the whole thing down and rebuild that bad boy up from scratch. Hopefully this is what we can expect Windows Mobile 7 will be, a complete redesign from the ground up, but Microsoft is so hush-hush on the subject that I am actually starting to worry that we will get just more of the same.

There is a shred of hope however. As the memo states above Microsoft if finally starting to see the light when it comes to not allowing your their vendors to defecate on their products. Apple has finally started to force Microsoft into a different way of thinking and what comes out of these new thought processes I am confident will help shape all of our futures for years to come. What we need is something new and fresh and I finally feel that Microsoft is at the point in their game to give it to us. We as consumers need a new consumer friendly Windows Mobile operating system that allows us all to manage our media and information with ease. We do not however need the Zune software tacked onto current Windows Mobile devices, given a new name, and sent out there into the wild. At the rate we're going it feels like Windows Mobile is starting to turn into a game of Jenga and I'm afraid at any moment the whole thing is just going to fall down.

HP iPAQ 914c unboxed

The iPAQ 914c is another great looking device from HP. The iPAQ 914 is a blackberry-style Windows Mobile device with a fixed full QWERTY keyboard. Typically you would expect a device of this form factor to be a Windows Mobile Standard style Smartphone but in this case HP have included WM 6.1 professional complete with touchscreen.



Phillip is putting a review together for us which should be here next week, so until then, here is our unbox video:



HP iPAQ 914 Specification:

* Windows Mobile 6.1 professional
* 2.5" transmissive TFT 320 x 240 pixel touch panel display
* Built-in Assisted GPS
* Integrated Quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, Tri Band HSPDA
* WiFi 802.11 b/g
* Bluetooth V2.0
* 416MHz processor
* 128MB SDRAM/ 256MB ROM
* 3 Megapixel Camera
* QWERTY Keyboard
* MicroSD Slot
* 1940 mAh Lithium Polymer battery
* 113 x 64 x 16 mm
* 146 grams

You can also watch the video from my videos blog

ASUS moving forward on ZX1 cancellation, adding two other phones?

CNET Asia has apparently received word that not only will ASUS' Lamborghini-branded ZX1 smartphone be canceled (as we mentioned earlier this month), but the company will also be putting the brakes on its forthcoming P560 and M536 phones as well. In a statement issued presumably to CNET, the company claims that the project has been postponed due to the "technical immaturity of a key component from one of our suppliers," though they seem to have left the door open for a reboot. We know one thing for sure -- it's clear that the P560 and M536 weren't those "more important devices" the company made reference to previously. They probably need the resources for another 25 versions of the Eee PC.

Sony Ericsson's G705 slider leaks onto internet, shows hope for the future

An undeterred Sony Ericsson appears to have a handsome new slider on its way out in the near future -- according to a slew of pictures leaked to the se4m forums -- meant to sit beside the previously spied (and supposedly forthcoming) Remi. The device -- dubbed the G705 -- will feature GPS, WiFi, a 2.4-inch display, a 3.2 megapixel camera with flash, 128MB of internal memory, and will run atop the A2 software platform. There's not a ton of info to go around right now, but if you hit the read link you can feast your eyes on a wide array of succulent photos. We're including another shot after the break, just in case you don't like traveling.