Personal GPS in a Mobile Phone

i4u writes "NTT DoCoMo announced today that it will introduce it's first Global Positioning Service (GPS)-compatible handset F661i, at the end of April. The GPS mobile phone enables users to determine their location at the touch of a button, and download location specific information via i-mode like graphical maps and other interesting information about the area. This is not like the GPS functionality that the US Phone companies introduced so far. In the US the GPS coordinates are only used for emergencies and not yet for actually providing value to the user in other situations. Users of the F661i can send their current location to other i-mode enabled phones. In addition, a memo function allows users to store location information, including map, telephone numbers and addresses. The phone supports three applications of the GPS functionality: 1)The GPS enabled Phone can be tracked by via a service, useful for instance for parents to track their kids. See also the Wherify GPS Person Locator. 2)Submission of current location in case of emergency to pre-defined organizations, like police, fire departments etc. Similar to the GPS functionality available in the US. 3)The F661i also can be used by businesses to track their delivery trucks and more. Similar to Car GPS devices."

Old phones might function somewhat like GPS too

[xYoni69x]

I'm sure this comes as great news for those of us that are paranoid:

There was an article in the news here (Israel) a few months ago that said cellular phones already can be used as tracking devices, as long as the battery is in (even if they are turned off). Of course, this can only be used by the cellular networks themselves. (And, I guess, police investigations.)

I guess the only way to be immune to the government spying powers is to be Amish or something. Or do they have that covered as well?

Great, now if only there were a standard...

[defile]

I hope there's a shakeout in the industry some day. Having investigated developing applications for these devices, I've always been disappointed in that either you need to sign up for some really expensive licenses, use Java (J2ME) which doesn't offer anywhere near the phone's true potential, or you have to deal with a new platform for each phone you come across, even across a single manufacturer's line.

One day this will stop sucking. Until then...

Another Use

[Efreet]

Would be to use your phone to leave messages for other people at the same geographic location. Imagine going up to a restuarant, consulting your phone, and seeing that there are a bunch of messages saying how good the food and service is. Just make sure you have a good interface and really good spam filters.

Like it or not, it's the law

[andy1307]

All mobile phones sold in the US will be required to have some sort of GPS tracking system. They call it e911 or something. The idea is that if you make an emergency call from your cell phone, the 911 operator should be able to pin point your location to within 2 city blocks.

This is bunk...

[Mondragon]

I have a Treo 300, and its' GPS capability can be used by Palm applications, so the statement that US phones don't offer positioning information to the user is false. Also, for the paranoid, you can disable palm application access to the GPS unit so that AOL can't track you while you're on Instant Messenger... ;-)

Re:Lots of phones already have GPS

[sstidman]

That's not exactly what Enhanced 911 is all about. Dialing 911 from your cell phone has always patched you to the correct 911 center (unless the cell tower happens to be close to a border). The major goal of E911 is the tell the emergency operaror where you are located. You can read more about E911 on the FCC website [fcc.gov].

There are many cell phones currently on the market which have what is called Assisted GPS. As another posted mentioned, Assisted GPS cell phones merely take measurments of the signal strength coming from various GPS satellites. These measurements are forwarded to the cell tower which calculates the mobile phones location. This is mainly implemented to support E911 in the cheapest way possible. However, I have seen numerous postings on the SprintPCS developer website [sprintpcs.com] forums that there are plans to put together a Java library which will permit application developers to write J2ME apps [sun.com] which can query the lat/long of the phone. Those postings are from Sprint employees, but they currently seem to be suggesting that we will see this as part of the Location API [jcp.org] included with the Java MIDP 2.0 [sun.com] to be released 4th Quarter 2003.

If I did not state it clearly above, once the cell tower calculates your position, it currently has no reason to pass that info back to your phone. The Location API will work by asking the cell tower for your location, not by reading some registers in your phone. Without the Location API (and the supporting software on the towers), there would be no way for you to write a mapping application that ran on your phone, regardless of how much memory you have. For obvious reasons, such a library would have to query the phone user before permitting the application to obtain location information. I also imagine that Sprint would have to come up with a scheme to prevent folks from reverse engineering the Sprint library and then implementing their own libraries which would not bother asking for permission. That is probably at least part of the reason why it is taking so long to get support for polling your phones location.