No GPS? Mobile search pushes past the hardware bottleneck.

Posted on 28th November 2007 at 11:07 am by Manley

GPS for mobile devices is not new. Handsets with GPS capabilities have been around for a while now, but take-up has been slow, with only an estimated 15% of handsets being sold with an in-built capability and sales of GPS SIM cards still in their infancy.

Now Google Maps Locator offers users a feasible workaround for mobile search applications.

Google has launched My Location for Google Maps, which spans users with GPS enabled handsets, early adopters of GPS SIM cards and users who are, for whatever reason, happy with their old, GPS free handsets.

Currently still in beta, the My Location technology is, according to the Google Press release, available on most Smartphones, including all color BlackBerry devices, all Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition devices, most Windows Mobile devices, newer Sony Ericsson devices, and some Motorola devices.

Palm is notable by its absence and this slight cannot be accidental, but the coverage is extensive and Google is clearly aiming to incorporate as much of the market as possible. The more GPS free users that can be adopted, the more users will remain once GPS hardware becomes mainstream, surely only months away now. Examples of handsets which will not yet be able to use this software include Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, Palm Treo 700W and, perhaps most notably, the iPhone.

My Location works by recognising the mobile cell tower to which a user is connecting or, to Anglicise things, their nearest aerial mast. From this Google estimates accuracy to around 10 city blocks, or between 400m and 5km, although every review I have read to date has reported better accuracies than this.

Obviously accuracy will not be able to compete with GPS (around 10m), particularly in rural areas where cell towers density means that each cell covers a much larger area, or with WPS software(around 10-20m) in an urban environment.

At the end of the day this is an excellent teaser for early adopters, but the instructional video that Google has produced is more informative and entertaining than I can emulate. Enjoy:

File under: google mobile search

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