At Nokia Connection ‘09, the Philippine delegation took part in the Ovi Race, which was basically the easiest way to allow the media to experience the GPS and Maps functionality of Ovi. This photo was taken at the Singapore Merlion where the team had to do a creative pose. The more creative the direction, the more points you’d get. So this is us taking a water break.

We had to upload the photo to the Share on Ovi site using the built in widgets on the two Nokia phones issued to us, the N97 and N86.

Photo taken by our group.

Post from: Cellphone9

What sucks about today’s GPR positioning technology is that it really just works outdoors. Sometimes, we feel the need to go into a more “macro” level of positioning especially when we’re inside a mall or a huge office building that’s unfamiliar to us and we need to find the nearest bathroom for that !!! huge emergency !!!.

Nokia has been working on a triangulating technology that uses WLAN to find your mobile phone and project you in relartion to everything else in the building:

The mobile uses the buildings’ WLAN infrastructure to triangulate your position and then indicates where you are on a building map. Nokia prototypes today can show your location – building section and floor level. They allow you to browse the building, find points of interest and you can even share your position with the people you choose, when you want. Today Nokia has Indoor Positioning trials ongoing within 40 buildings worldwide.[Nokia]

So it isn’t just bathrooms – it’s everything and to be honest I feel that this is more useful than the “macro” GPS technology. Now if only malls and establishments could have a standard to use to allow this system to scale, wow.

[Photo c/o Nokia]

Post from: Cellphone9