Cell phones and GPS

Sorry about not posting for a while.  If you know me you know that there are times that I don’t have a lot to say.  In the description part I mention that I got tired of registering with different websites to comment on stuff so I started a blog.  Lately the news has been covered over with coverage of Haiti, and I really don’t have a lot to say about that.  I’m not saying that there isn’t anything to say about it.  I’m saying that I’m not the one to talk about the place because I’ve never been there.  The best I can do for those people is to pray for them.  I am doing that, and I hope you are to. 

I’ll try to stick to things that I think I understand.  If I’m wrong about something I trust that someone will comment on it.  I have enabled moderation on the comments, but I just want to keep the blog clean.  If you comment using non-military grade language I’ll post it even if you disagree with me.  I know all three of my followers and I don’t think that you will be posting anything bad, but the blog itself could be read and commented on by anyone in the world.  So far all the feedback that I have gotten has been positive.  I’ll take that to mean that the whole world agrees with me ;-)

Anyway, I saw this article about Nokia giving away navigation software.  I know a little about navigation systems.  In the Army we had the boxes that would give us the grid coordinates of our current position sometimes down to one meter accuracy.  They still taught us land navigation by compass and map because not everyone was issued a GPS and batteries can die.  I had a car with factory GPS installed.  I own a tom-tom.  I also own a droid.  So I’ve experienced navigation from compass to cell phone.

Nokia’s move here should not come as a surprise to anyone.  I would be surprised if Apple didn’t make the same move.  The way I see it the cell phone is where the GPS unit belongs.  The in car navigation was stunk.  The GPS unit itself was probably pretty good, but the maps weren’t updated.  With a cell phone you can easily download updates. 

Also it’s not going to be long till someone figures out that you could have the cell phone update a centralized map with routes taken and travel times so that you could have maps that update themselves with new roads and such automatically.  All they would have to do is assume that say 500 phones traveling along a path between 15 and 100mph means that they are on a road or railroad and bounce that off of railway maps to make sure that you are looking at a road.  You may have to add some time constraint to keep the people who drive ATVs and motorcycles off road from making a road on your map, but this isn’t too hard to do.

This would give you the ability to account for traffic patterns when your program looks for routes to take to your destination.  You could also have the cell phone send up an alert when it is traveling at a slower than expected speed.  Then the central map could kick out a detour for all the other phones using their software to avoid the slowdown.

Tom-Tom could do this if they included some way for their units to call home.  I bought a cheap model so it’s possible that they have this without me knowing about it.  The problem with this is that at some point the cell phone carriers will realize that people might not want a smart phone if the already have a Tom-Tom which would make Tom-Tom a competitor.  You don’t see businesses playing nice with their competition so Tom-Tom’s data plan is likely to go up.  Same thing applies with any other manufacturer of stand alone GPS units.  The only to deal with this would be for the GPS maker to come out with a way to tether off a less smart phone.  If they can’t do this the stand alone GPS will be almost dead.  There will still be a market for the ruggedized ones among hikers, hunters, and such.  That’s the way I see it.