So I bought a Handy GPS from Garmin 3 weeks ago that I received last week. Turned out the reception in Tokyo is pretty bad *thanks* to the high buildings. The plan was to record all the GPS coordinates of the pictures I take.

But this solution turned out to be a failure: bad reception (indoor-null and outdoor useless) and also very long time between the time I would switch on the GPS and when it would manage to track enough satellites to give me my position.
Then Kurt moblogged his position with his new GPS phone (and now adds the coordinates in most of his moblog posts) (and yes I know that Stuart did that too back in November 2002…) and I clicked.
The next day I bought a similar AU phone, the A5304T. This model is a bit more advanced I think (it actually has a GPS chip in it which gives an even better precision to the location against 10-50m withOUT the chip), it can track you in real time and have the map rotate if you rotate the phone too. In my case, outdoor, the precision is perfect, on the spot, and indoor, I get the 10-50 meter window.
NTT Docomo launched their first GPS phone (F661i) a week ago but had to recall all of them for a software problem. AU has 4 phones Navi-enabled at the moment (1 with a GPS chip). They can provide you with a range of services:
- Transportation aide: if you input your starting point and your destination, and precise whether you are going by foot, car, train, it will pull you the best way to go as a list (or show you a track on the phone and even update the map in real time as you make shortcut decisions on your way in the case of the GPS chip one).
- Location aide: provides you with a range of information related to your location like restaurant reviews and shops locations.
- You can let your friends know where you are and how to get to you by sending them the coordinates of where you are by email and they can get a map location out of it. in your phone book, you can attach a map of where your friends live to their phone numbers.
- You can locate your (same network/GPS phone) friends by tracking their phones (yeah you can)

Probably a host of other services will spring up in the next months.
Of course (in AU’s case) all the menus are in Japanese but who cares, everybody can follow a line on a map. OK, for the menus, I had to try all of them for hours to get to understand the way they work, as well as speak to the customer services who have some agents who can speak English.(From your mobile dial 157 or from your house phone dial 00777111 and then press 0 then 2 and when you get to speak to somebody ask them if you can speak to somebody in English and if you don’t know how to say that, ask them if they can speak English and if you can’t say that either, mumble something in English and say Hai when she sounds all surprised and tells you she’s gonna get somebody.)

In my case, all I wanted was to be able to record the coordinates of the pictures I take as part of a plan to make my pictures future proof. Think about a new layer of information that we could overlay our cities with. In the near future, it could be that infos related to cities will be organised by GPS locations as it allows a database request (on a website dealing for instance with infos about a city’s different areas) to quickly compare the position of a person with all the restaurants, or reviews offered by Content providers as well as (and that’s where it gets exciting) comments left by you, me, the people regarding this very area. This data could also be used for archeological purposes (like Mike suggested), or to recreate a city with all the pictures that have been taken in it. UltraBob’s Neighborhood Project is a step in this direction. (I still have to upload the pics of mine btw). But I can also imagine in 10 years, somebody coming to Japan could also decide to do an update of some of my pictures and track down the places where I have taken them and take a picture of the updated look of that place.

Many ideas are in gestation about how to use this technology for fun or serious matters. And if you are interested in knowing a bit more about them, I wouldn’t miss the 1IMC this summer in Tokyo.