Geolocation on the Desktop
This is really cool. Android has some of these capabilities, and so I have some experience with them on my phone. My weather bug, for example, shows me local weather.
There’s a problem with it, tho, that I’ve experienced recently on my n810. That problem is: how do you get the location into the desktop?
GPS is not really an option here. If you are outside, so you can get a signal, you don’t want to run GPS, because it’s a *huge* battery drain. Seriously. I have to turn off the GPS on my n810 every time I unplug it from my car, because otherwise it won’t last more than 2 hours. It draws a lot more power than wifi does. And, if you have power, you’re probably inside, where GPS can’t get an even approximate fix. So, GPS is out.
My G1 gets around this by using cell tower location for approximate location fixes. This is quite sufficient for, say, weather, telling what city you’re in, and so on. It works great, but is not usesful for anything other than a phone. Maybe, in the future, 3G/4G data cards will allow other devices to have this capability? It would be nice, but I can’t imagine the telcos not charging for it…
That leaves wifi location. Some of this can be done for free. I could program in to my computer the location of known wifi basestations (such as home and work). Then, just checking which wifi I’m on would give me approximate (and even fairly precise) locations. However, this is limited in number, and manually intensive. Integration into some kind of map would help: I can pick the location where I am (or type in the address) and have my local wifi location database updated with knowledge of that location.
Then, there’s wifi location services, that use the scan information to find your location from a huge database of known wifi basestations. This is nice, but you have to pay for it.
So, the challenge to a geo-aware desktop is this: How do you know where you are? Are there options I’ve missed?