Comments on: Google Maps Mobile Now Has Virtual GPS

By: John Campbell

John Campbell — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 14:10:09 +0000

The latest S60 version of Google maps already makes use of the GPS receiver in my N95.

A company called Trisent (http://www.trisent.com/) are doing some quite interesting things with location based technology at the moment – in theory requiring much less operator support. An application on the phone sends back various data (signal strength, GSM frame advance, cell ID etc…) to their server over GPRS or SMS. It the calculates your position from what it knows about the network and sends it back to the application.

By: njar

njar — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:50:21 +0000

There was a pretty detailed discussion about this on the MomoLondon email chain..

By: Mr Gumby

Mr Gumby — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:49:03 +0000

…lots of speculation on this about how much Google must be paying the MNO’s to use their Cell ID info – some as high as â‚¬0.10 per time.

Get real – Cell ID info is out there in a myriad of user-generated (Jaiku/Navizon/ZoneTag) and commercial databases, tied to lat/lon, for the taking. You really think Google & TeleAtlas haven’t been recording every MNO CellID & WiFi hotspot MAC address as they drive around photographing everything?

Thing is – it only works if the Cell ID doesn’t change…either because there’s a major network sharing deal / reshuffle on the cards (Voda/Orange, and possibly 3/T-Mobile?) or because the MNO actively changes their entire Cell ID scheme, to reclaim the trump card of location.

But with WiFi in every street now, maybe WiFi-only is quite adequate, almost all the time.

By: John Burton

John Burton — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:05:27 +0000

Oops that should say “doesn’t”

By: John Burton

John Burton — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:04:27 +0000

This does seem to work on 3.
The help / about screen seems to correctly display the phone cell, but then it rapidly displays a message saying my location is not available at this time. I presume that google need to know the location of the networks cells for this and maybe they don’t for 3?

By: James Whatley

James Whatley — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 10:17:28 +0000

I’m sure during the lunch break at the recent Future of Mobile a certain Mike Stead was showing off some other fancy GPS thingy wotsit application…

What was it called again?