Either way, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Your demand (for the trip outlined before) is totally valid and should be built in, happening as soon as you grant permission to share things.

My demands as a map-making navigation nerd, otoh, are decades away.

Hey Steve, like I said, I don’t think the problem is the operator cost structure any more. GPS has been built into the devices directly with locally available APIs for getting at the data. Sounds like you agree though that even though that issue has been removed, everyone is still developing pretty poor systems to try to milk what money they can out of users instead of trying to provide a real platform.

I worked for one and back around 2000/01 was part of an LBS project. This was not the first one, incidentally (I guess they considered baking it into the launch product set, which would have been great!). It was a total cluster. Seriously, 45 minutes to introduce everyone in meeting #1.

And through the project, the UX team I represented came up with the standard use patterns and information depictions you’d expect (don’t imply precision with crosshairs, use a circle) and most of all: make it open. Let people see their data, convert to other formats. Let 3rd parties get access to the info at the user’s request (there were already regulations around it).

Sure, it was future-looking, with essentially no GPS, but cell/sector/triangulation still worked. A lot of contextual things could be done with location at the 800 yard range. And triangulation was demonstrated to have a reliable 50 yard accuracy (or better).

Yes, ten years ago any of the carriers could have set up and released a useful infrastructure for LBS. I am sure others actually had project teams. And ours at least died because there was no /immediate/ business case. And eventually a terrible, muddled sea of third party tack ons appeared. They mostly don’t do anything good (and nothing for free) and are almost entirely not what you, and everyone else wants which is something integrated with your mobile experience, instead of being “run an app, accomplish a task, end.”

But I’ve never really thought about this or been frustrated by any of my carrier project work.

This can then be mapped on Google Maps. Very sweet.
Owen

Nokia Research is hosting a version of Sports Tracker that runs on an E71. I’ve got a link to it on the bottom of this post on my blog:

http://everwas.com/2008/12/software-for-your-nokia-e71.html

Also, make sure you’ve got expansion memory b/c it needs it to run properly.