Hacker-Friendly Wireless Phones w/ GPS?

Posted by Cliff on Monday January 19, 2004 @04:45PM from the geeky-preferences-sought dept.

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I'm looking to buy a cell phone that is reasonably accessible to hacking. Not illegal stuff, I'd just want to be able to write and load programs on the phone myself. I particularly want access to the GPS in the phone. I'm not picky about what language or environment I have to use as long no hardware mods to the phone are required and I don't have to pay someone an arm and a leg for a developers kit. Can anyone recommend something (just normal sized phones please, not the big PDA hybrids) they've had good luck with?"

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Avoid Sprint PCS by seinman · 2004-01-19 17:00 · Score: 3, Insightful

Most (perhaps all, not sure exactly) Sprint PCS phones don't have user-accessible GPS co-ordinates. Instead, it just relays the raw data from the satellites to the Sprint tower to do the math involved to locate you. Of course, they don't let the end users have this data. I've heard rumors of them having an extra feature in the near future that lets you get the actual co-ordinates from them, but for an extra fee. So for now, i'd stay away from Sprint and look towards other providers.