Mobile Development News

In documenting application areas evolving in the wireless location space over the last two years, I've tallied over 75 commercial applications across the business horizontal and consumer markets in North America alone. About 50 of these applications run on NEXTEL and use the IP-based A-GPS user plane location access method offered by way of J2ME through Motorola's freely-available published iDEN SDK.

This is largely due to the fact that they are still the only carrier that actually has launched the ability for applications to use the GPS functionality on the handsets. Other carriers have been doing trials for some time now and have it open to select developers. One of these apps actually isn't for NEXTEL:

Perhaps you have heard about an award-winning LBS application called BiM Active developed by Bones in Motion? They recently won the grand prize in the NAVTEQ LBS Challenge II developers contest. BiM Active allows users to capture details on any outdoor fitness activity with simple GPS-enabled mobile phones. The app collects GPS data locally, pushes collected data to a server, processes the data server-side, and offers Web and wireless interfaces to view the information—a flow well-suited for user plane architectures and access methods.

The author of the LBS zone article used one of their handsets in what looks like a day out with a snowboard. Following the links, we have Bones in Motion which is relatively quiet, except for the press, such as this release by QUALCOMM which specifically states they are using BREW. Now what carrier could that be?

In any case, the landscape is set for very rich and unique applications with either J2ME or BREW and their respective location APIs. And don't mapping and tracking are the only things that can be done with GPS available. Much, much more is possible. Can you do it?

The Location Based Service - LBS - zone