Nokia N95
James recently mentioned the latest GPS enabled camera from Rioch. The chipsets that receive the GPS signals are apparently now available in bulk for $4 a piece, very soon cost will no longer be the barrier to making this default functionality in digital cameras.
I’m waiting in anticipation for the new Nokia N95, it’s due for release this spring and promises a lot with regards to geo-enabled mobile applications and digital photography. Pocket sized it has a 5 mega pixel digital camera with what should hopefully be a half decent lens from Carl Ziess, and…assisted GPS! A few phones out there have this kind of functionality, but the big plus here is that this is the first Nokia phone to run the 3rd edition of the series 60 platform (S60).
The S60 platform provides rich developer support, here’s a blurb from the Niokia website…
application developers can work in C++ (using native Symbian OS APIs), the Java™ language (using Mobile Information Device Profile [MIDP] 2.0 with an extensive range of additional Java™ Specification Requests [JSRs]), Python, Visual Basic, or C#, as well as with Macromedia Flash from Adobe.
One particularly useful JSR, available on S60 3rd edition(sp1) phones, is JSR-179 - a location API. This means, for the first time, developers have access to location information outside of the walled garden. No longer do mobile developers have to make a web request to the mobile operator for the location, they can just grab it locally of the phone, mash it up with their spatial data, and bingo, you can find your nearest pub.
I haven’t tried my hand a mobile application development, but with the comprehensive SDK’s from Nokia, I can’t imagine it will be long before someone writes a little app that records the location of your camera phone photos and spits out some kml.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Rob
A mate found a good review on YouTube…
Feb 14th, 2007
Danish
Having eagerly waited nigh on 6 months for Nokia’s latest mobile phone release, the N95 hit stores in early April 2007 and I snapped one up almost instantly. This phone really has it all especially from geo-blogging point of view with a built in 5 MP digital camera and GPS. So it came as somewhat of a shock to find that photos taken with the N95 weren’t geo-tagged as standard since this would invariably make it a breeze to upload pictures to sites such as Flickr and Google Map mashups.
Fortunately, the N95 utilises a Symbian OS, an open-standards operating system for which there is growing support. Consequently, I have made an ‘Application Wishlist’ request for geo-tagging that you may want to keep an eye on:
http://www.s60.com/life/application/wishlist/displayWishDetails.do?wishId=503&activeCat=-2
Apr 12th, 2007
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