Using the GPS Features on Cell Phones?

Rylor asks: "A couple of years ago I bought the Samsung 300NP cell phone, which has a GPS feature that I can turn on or off. The primary purpose is to meet the Emergency 911 calling requirements laid out by the FCC. I've checked the manual several times and it only says that I can use the GPS feature for anything service I want, but that's it. Sprint doesn't offer anything else about it. So my question to Slashdot: if you have a cellphone with this feature, what cool ways are you using it?"

Comments

Killer app for cell phones

[El]

Use the GPS to create a map of all the areas where the phone works reliably, and where it doesn't work... aren't digital phones constantly touching base with the cell towers anyway? Then they could get rid of that obnoxious guy constantly walking around saying "Can you hear me now? Good!"

GPS applications are coming soon

[mockojumbie]

Our company (Blue Cove) is currently testing GPS apps with with major carriers, one of which will be enabling commercial Brew applications to use the Snaptrack (Qualcomm) servers that provide the MS-based and MS-assisted capabilities in the next few quarters across the US. For obvious reasons they don't want apps and the public to use the same physical servers as E-911.
All Qualcomm CDMA chipsets now have GPS functionality. You should be seeing traffic, POI, mapping and all sorts of geo-games this year.

Sprint would rather you didn't

[raindog2]

I contacted Sprint last winter to ask how I could use the GPS functionality in Java applications to run on the phone, or on a web site, with an eye to making something like a little map of the area with little dots telling me the relative positions of myself and my business partner, for example. They told me to sign up for their developer mailing list and website. I did that, and upon diving into their development forums, found that their party line is that such programming information is proprietary, and that they have some kind of exclusive contracts in place with other parties who are supposed to be rolling out services Real Soon Now.

A year later and still nothing. I've stopped bothering with it myself, and keep the locator feature turned off.... it will still tell 911 where you are regardless. Maybe someday one of the other carriers will open up this feature and someone will develop a killer app so that Sprint has no choice but to follow, but their handling of independent developers leaves a lot to be desired thus far.

Overview of how it works...

[stienman]

There is no full GPS unit inside the phone. Instead it takes the GPS signal, does some limited processing, and sends the information to the cell tower it's in contact with. The cell tower has the remainder of the equipment to finish the processing (including knowledge about its own location and the signal it's receiving) and can locate the phone to within the usual resolution of GPS (several meters on a good day)

To use the phone as a GPS unit, one would have to write an app that used airtime to connect to the tower and get the coordinates to display on the phone itself.

I suspect that for the next few years we will barely see more than location based spam and perhaps a few games that will ultimately fail in which location plays a role in gameplay.

In short, the only cool use so far is calling 911 and knowing that in two years they should be able to locate you...if the GPS signal is good enough.

-Adam

Re:Mainly, I use it for stalking my girlfriend.

[Fizzl]

The restriction order says 'No No...', but her eyes says 'Yes Yes!'
*Stroking his Xena collectible*

Re:Hiking

[bcrowell]

• Shopping
  Driving
  Geocaching
  Spying

Yeah, just to amplify on the parent post, it's really useful when driving. Yesterday, for instance, I got turned around as I was driving, and the GPS on my cell phone really came in handy for figuring out which direction I was going, without even pulling over. See, with my left hand I used the cell phone to get a GPS fix, while with the right hand I sketched a latitude-longitude grid on the inside of the windshield using a red grease pencil. I marked my location on the grid, and then after traveling another couple of blocks, I repeated the process and marked my new location on the grid. Voila, that told me I was driving west! The only real problem was that the grease-pencil diagram was a little hard to read, because the setting sun was in my eyes.