Killer apps queue here please…

Last week my mate, who has a N93 made the comment that Nokia doesn’t really have a decent ‘killer app’ for their smart phones (One might think of the iPhones interface as a potential ‘killer app.’)

Nokia doesn’t seem to be able to get everything together in a nice, sexy, utterly compelling package.
Ngage was a good attempt, but it didn’t really come close to providing a ‘must have’ gaming experience.
The GPS is great but it’s not very well integrated with the camera or the other software on the phone. Specking of which, I’ve just upgrade to AGPS and the improvement is really noticeable. Nokia must have been planning all along to supplement the crummy TI GPS chip with the data connection of the phone. I’m wondering what manufactures like Tom Tom are going to do to compete with this?
I noticed that Tom Tom has a patent for overlaying location and path data onto a video feed. Shame Nokia didn’t use the camera and the GPS in the N95 to do the same thing.

Unfortunately Nokia seem to have the same problem that Microsoft admitted to recently.
All sorts of great disparate tech, but not much creative ‘glue’ to bind it all together.

I signed up to get onto the Nokia Mosh social networking site, and I guess I get to see what they’ve been up to when it goes Beta. But what Nokia needs is that ‘must have’ thang.
For a long time, the phone bit was the ‘killer app’ and SMS came out of left field, as did ring tones. The radio is great, but visual radio is almost pointless it so underutilised.

What next?

Pondering GPS

OK, I know very little about GPS (other then the excellent entries I’ve read in this group.)

I read somewhere that a survey found that GPS is more anticipated by potential users of mobile phones then mobile TV.
This doesn’t surprise me as finding ones way around the countryside strikes me as a damn useful thing to have in a phone.

I’m noting down a few thoughts, after using the GPS in the N95 a few times in the last couple of weeks…

• GPS seems to work better if I’m driving. The positioning seems to be more accurate if I’m standing in the middle of the road. Maybe trees confuse the satellite signals? That said, I had some real problems getting a fix on the satellites recently, until I slid the phone up onto the dash. Once I had a fix, my passenger wouldn’t let go of the phone as she found it fascinating to watch our progress on the screen as we drove through the countryside.
• It would be nice if the camera app in the N95 auto logged onto the GPS and geotagged photos and videos. In fact, it would be interesting if everything were geotagged such as SMS and email.
• Maps should allow an option to override the screensaver without running the backlight continuously.
• It would be nice to see the two GPS apps (the info app and Maps) combined.
• This device should be the ideal hiking phone, but the lack of protection for the screen, the strength of the plastic case, and the battery life reduce its effectiveness. What if the phone could plot a path following my movements through the bush? This data could be picked up by the Lifeblog app and mashed up with geotagged photos (including recorded sounds and video,) and finally the whole lot uploaded to Google Maps.
• There is a GPS device on sale over here that allows the user to take a photo of a place, and this becomes part of the info for tagging a location. The user can browse for the photo of where they want to go, select, and the path finder does the rest. The N95 is the idea platform for this sort of functionality.

I thought it was interesting to read in the manual that the N95 has three different ariels.
Is this why the phone is clothed in plastic fantastic?
Is it not possible to ‘time slice’ access by the phone/Wifi/GPS to a single areal?

I was bush walking on the weekend and a couple of people whipped out their GPS units.
We got to talking about something called ‘assisted GPS’ where the Cell towers are used to glean extra position data.
Since there are three ariels in the N95, Any ideas on whether the N95 can use this technique?

Things that I'm wondering about this device...

• Will it tag the photos with GPS info?
• Can this info be read by sites such as
  Flickr for instant Geotagging?
• Can it GPS tag the video?
• How much better then Mjpg, is the Mpeg4
  format that they have decided to use?
• Will it be able to take a series of photos
  at predefined intervals?
• Does it make coffee?