29 January 2009

Tracking your location from a mobile phone

Posted by Mick under: Equipment Review; Maps & Compasses .

You can track my (almost) current location, by checking out the items below, which are provided by two different services that utilise a JAVA MIDP2.0 application loaded onto my ZTE T165i mobile phone along with its internal GPS device.

The first two come from TrackMyJourney, which provides a bundle of GPS related data on your phone as well as linking your location (and recent track) into an image that auto-update’s as well as a standalone still image. While this service doesn’t utilise any of the major online mapping services (Windows Live, Google Maps. etc) on your phone, it does provide a utility allowing you to import any maps you do own after converting them to the TMG format.

Unfortunately, for some reason TrackMyJourney occasionally seems to think that i am located at 0°0’0″N and 0°0’0″E

The next service, from GMap-Track, provides a very simple output showing your last reported location on a map (Windows Live, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, etc) in your mobile, as well as the ability to embed a Google Map into a web page.

While both applications are good and easy to use, and GMap-Track is great from a web page embedding perspective, TrackMyJourney does provide a lot more info and options, but…it would be nice to see it include the option to utilise map images from Windows Live, Google Maps and others if you required them.

Leave a Reply