As Brady from O’Reilly pointed out early this week, the new iPhone 3.0 software and new iPhone 3G S have some major improvements that will further accelerate the development of exciting new location aware applications.
The iPhone now joins the two Android powered HTC phones in having a high quality networked assisted GPS, a digital compass and of course ubiquitous network access, the necessary building blocks for a phone to access information based on its location.
We can expect to see more applications that use these capabilities to present information is truly innovative ways like wikitude and sky map, and of course applications which put the phones location core to their functionality, the ZipCar app demoed at WWDC is a great example of this, and you can imagine a range of security or e-commerce application which may be enabled by location in this way.
Imagine your credit card transaction verified in part by the fact you are in the same location as the vendor..
At the same time more traditional mapping users are served by applications like
AccuTerra Mobile which although one of many trail tracking applications aimed a walkers, is generating a buzz because of its high quality topographic mapping data.
This is an obvious market that in the UK we could expect to see an Ordnance Survey partner develop a similar application, indeed it will be a test of the new innovation friendly strategy of the OS to see if a similar application is developed in the UK.
After many false dawns Location based applications are really now with us, and so very accessible, with the new Mapkit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 and similar functionality on Android developing simple mapping based apps has never been more straightforward and crucially with integrated Application Stores easy to reach potential customers.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
