Russell Beattie

I saw this review yesterday and thought it was neat but wasn't sure if it was sufficiently interesting to blog about, I'm posting it here now because I'm soon going to talk about location-based services:

All About Symbian: MiniGPS v0.95

MiniGPS has got a new update to 0.95 version, with new events and ability to export and import the collected cells.

From PsiLOC:

Supported Events:
- Log in alarm,
- Log out alarm,
- Log in switch profile,
- Log out switch profile
- Log in power off,
- Log out power off

That means, you can create an event to have an alarm at the moment your phone logs in (or out) a selected cell. So you will be able to sleep calmly in your train to work or school - it will wake you up precisely at your station, even if your train is late? You can also set it up to remain you of speed controls! For every such alarm you can select any sound file from your device (also prepared by you) or even ?No sound? if you like to keep it quiet.

Once you get out of office you can automatically switch from calm, blue, standard tone office profile to your private one, red color and heavy metal ring tone!

For places like church, theater, hospital etc. you can set a power off event which will just switch your phone off as soon as you come there! No more embarrassing rings during performance?

Since in big cities you are usually in range of a few network cells you can collect them all and put them to the groups like Home or Office and than you can create events for the whole group instead of individual cells.

For those who like to be well informed miniGPS displays not only the name of the current cell, but also its identification numbers and even the current signal strength in dBm units!

Moreover, to enable users to exchange info about cells in their locations we have introduced export feature (simply by sending selected cells via Infra red or Blue Tooth) and import feature. It works with common standard CSV files, so it is possible also to view and edit them with Excel on your PC!

For more info and to buy/trial:
http://www.psiloc.com/nokia/eng/minigpsS60/index.html

Price: $14.95
Size on phone: 85kB

This is pretty cool stuff. It's not real GPS because most phones don't have it yet, but uses unique information like the id of the cell tower and the strength of the signal to locate where you are. What a cool trick! I had no idea you could even GET to this info from the Symbian OS.

-Russ