All I want for Christmas (I figured I’d get in really early) is a mobile phone with a built in GPS receiver which I can program. I’ve seen the GPS modules you can use with some phones, and even some phones which have GPS built in, but nothing which looks to approach the level of quality I would want (Mac users are trouble).
One of the big sticking points is that I haven’t seen anything much about programming with the GPS reciever, which makes me suspect it’s not exposed at that level. Apparently unlike the rest of the world I really don’t care (perhaps just because I’ve not tried it) about having maps or driving directions on a phone.
- I want to be able to SMS a latitide/longitude to another phone and have that phone show and arrow and distance to that location.
- I want to take a photo with a dinky little phone camera and have it tagged with the location from which it was taken.
- I want to send my location to some sort of directory service and get back the latitude and longitude (and for the phone to calculate distance and direction) to the nearest petrol station / restaurant / juggling store.
- I want to walk around a national park or a new city and have the phone point out and tell me about things of interest (without me loading a guide book into it in advance ideally).
The thing I find really interesting is the integration between information about my location, and the ability to use the phone’s communication features to use that information in useful and interesting ways.
An aside about why GPS data rules
The latitude/longitude information the GPS produces is great because it digitises location in a consistent way that something like street addresses, can’t match. Given two latitude/longitude pairs it’s easy to get the distance and direction between them. Getting even that simple information (surprisingly often quite enough) for street addresses requires stacks of really complex mapping data. While I’m sure it’s possible, there are no services free I know of to turn an Australian street address into a latitude/longitude (I’m sure it’s possible if I was willing to pay enough).