Google Maps Mobile: My Location

08Dec07

Thanks to Paul for pointing out the new GPS-less My Location feature in Google Maps for Mobile (yet another milestone in the history of human technological evolution I would have missed due to my almost total absence from the blogosphere lately).

The geek in me secretly hopes that if applications like GMM become more and more popular, handset manufacturers will be incited to provide APIs to cell tower information on a broader range of handsets; and also offer more detailed cell tower measurement information. (Currently I’m only aware of APIs that provide the ID of the serving cell, no neighbour cells, no timing advance i.e. distance estimates; the only noteworthy exception seems to be – I hate to say it – the iPhone).

I wonder if Google has any plans to open the cell-ID geocoding service to the general public, so that we can all use it for our own apps? I mean, it’s not that they need to spend a lot of money collecting that data: after all its those Google Maps for Mobile users with GPS enabled phones out there who unknowingly collect the data for them! Well, ok, not really unknowingly since the info screen states it clearly every time you switch the My Location feature on, but hey who’s reading the manual, anyway 😉 Come on Google! Give us an API!