- Twitter on steroids. Now you can know where all your friends are all the time.
I'll leave gross automated invasions of privacy to you young kids. I'm apparently too old to see the joy in any random stranger being able to look up my precise location at any time ...
- GPS information embedded in the metadata of the pictures you take with your cellphone. Integrate with a photo site and Google Maps, and you have a cool Web 2.0 service. Or integrate with an automated photo album of your vacation.
- Go out hiking, biking, or driving where you have never been. See something interesting, take a picture (and record the location), and then look it up when you get home.
This is an argument for GPS on cameras more than on phones, IMHO. Inasmuch as a phone contains a camera, it applies, but if I'm willing to live with a crap-quality photo I'm also pretty much willing to live with not having precise latitude and longitude. IMHO, I'm much more interested in GPS (and compass heading and pitch) auto-embedding in my SLR's output so that three years from now I can go directly to that spot where we happened upon an Osprey's nest and see what's there then.
But my cell phone? I guess I'm too old, again, to see the draw in taking any kind of long-term pictures with that crappy lens and sensor. And, short term, the GPS headings are rarely useful attached to pictures. If I'm traveling somewhere where I'm unable to navigate back (ie, where the streets are all unmarked or there are no streets), I take my pocket GPS for just such occasions. I can take a picture if needed, and I can record the GPS coords if needed. It'd be nice to have the two attached to each other, but hardly important.
- Flying cross country and see an interesting land formation? Take a picture, record your location, and look it up when you get home.
Does GPS work when airborne? I thought GPS devices tended to lose accuracy dramatically with altitude.
- Singles service. Enter your information and likes/dislikes into a service, and the map shows the general location of other singles with similar likes/dislikes in your area. Maybe add an anonymous "invite" message to the service ("Want to have a coffee at the starbucks on 3rd street?").
This seems to belong to thw uber-Twitter comment above. Perhaps not being single is the thing keeping me from getting over the loss of privacy here.
- Every second record your location and then when you get home download it to your computer. You can build up a database of all your locations.
- Record your location while running, and map your location and speed. Track peformance improvements.
Two tasks which are just as easily accomplished with an existing GPS device for the three people who would want to do that.
It all comes to this: GPS does precisely one thing: it tells you where you are. Automated GPS (ie, having GPS constantly recourding your travels) adds the ability to track where you've been.
Most of the time, adults know where they are with enough accuracy to get by, and the level of tracking GPS is able to provide isn't enough to tell me where I've been in my house in the last five minutes where I might have set down my keys. There are lots of "reasons" for wanting GPS and automated tracking, but none of them get anywhere near the threshold of "iller feature" to me. I'd rather see GPS in my camera than my phone, for instance.
That having been said, it's a lot cheaper and easier to add GPS to a phone than to a camera, primarily because, well, it's already there if you're selling your phone in the US. But, I wouldn't base a buying decision on it not being exposed.
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