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View Full Version : Using Cell Tower Identifier for Location-Based Services?


cludwig
01-22-2003, 07:33 AM
I saw this product called PsiLOC+ miniGPS (http://www.psiloc.com/nokia/eng/minigpsS60/index.html) mentioned on infosync, and it got me thinking that with the growing knowledge of the Phone Edition's inner workings something like this might be possible for us PPCPE folks.

Executive summary -- Basically they are using information about which cell towers are in range to trigger events. They give some nice examples, like having an alarm go off when you get close to your train stop (that way even if the train's delayed and you're asleep you still get the "wake-up call" when you're near your destination.) Or how about having the phone turn the volume down (and switch to vibrate) automatically whenever you're in church or your favorite movie theater?

I started a thread (http://xda-developers.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=168) over on xda-developers.com as well, hoping that they might be able to provide some of the relevant info.

Even though this isn't nearly so "accurate" as the CDMA GPSone stuff or the triangulation stuff that GSM does for e911 compliance (clearly "within a cell" isn't accurate enough for navigation purposes, not least because it still doesn't tell you which direction you're headed ;-) ,) there are still a lot of fun things you could do and it seems like it ought to be easy to implement. And of course designing around this now certainly doesn't preclude using more accurate location information in the future, should it be available at the software level.

Hank Scorpio
01-22-2003, 05:55 PM
I love this stuff, I hope this comes to pass, it would be like living in Minority Report land.