More than a phone with a GPS navigator

Alexey Feldgendler alexey at feldgendler.ru
Fri Mar 28 12:00:42 CET 2008


On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:51:14 +0100, Andy Green <andy at openmoko.com> wrote:

> We get very approximate "part of town" location information for free
> from GSM cell number just by being a phone.  We get +/- 100m specific
> location information from powering the WLAN and doing an AP scan
> periodically, studying the AP MAC addresses we can hear beacons from.
> So it can differentiate between being at home, office, lunch,
> travelling, visiting and so on autonomously.

What's the advantage of the other ways of locating yourself (GSM, WiFi)  
over GPS?

> We don't neccesarily know the GPS coordinates or name of a location, but
> with such a daemon we can pretty cheaply know if we are back there
> without needing GPS, and we can recognize it as a "place" and subtly
> change contexts on the phone, different background, as Alexey said ring
> or vibrate, different sorting order for contacts based on who you
> contacted from that place, etc.

The latter is very interesting! Indeed: I live in Norway but sometimes  
visit Russia. I rarely call my Russian friends while I'm in Norway because  
of the high international call rates, but when I come to Russia, I'm very  
likely to call them!


-- 
Alexey Feldgendler <alexey at feldgendler.ru>
[ICQ: 115226275] http://feldgendler.livejournal.com




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