Navizon — iPhone ‘GPS’ application
Picked this up on Gizmodo — the application, Navizon (”peer to peer wireless positioning”), uses your cell ID to place your location. Smart. Very similar to the way Jaiku does it.
Link: Apple: iPhone Faux-GPS Hack Works and is Awesome - Gizmodo
The iPhone just got GPS. Well, its actually using peer collected GPS data linked to cellular tower, which Navizon describes as peer to peer location detection. Either way — it actually works. This morning, the Navizon GPS app showed up in Installer.app. After creating a username and login (get this: email NOT required), the free app started up, taking about 30 seconds to find my location accurate within a few hundred feet — good enough to use as a starting point for driving directions. Then it pushes your coordinates, by latitude and longitude, to many, many, many decimal places of degrees, to the map application.
Navizon is even cleverer than your article suggests. It uses a combination of GSM Cell data, wireless access points and GPS data to locate handsets. A handset equipped with Navizon and GPS becomes a data collection device which collects and records geo-tagged records of all GSM and WiFi sources it sees, then uploads the data back to Navizon when connected to the internet.
It would appear that the iPhone variant of Navizon only operates in ‘where am I’ mode and not in ‘data collection’ mode - for the latter you will need either a Symbian S60 handset (such as the Nokia N95) or a Windows Smartmobile handset - both preferably with GPS.
Posted by James Body on September 20th, 2007 at 10:54 am.Not sure how much it really uses cell ID — it places me at a place where I lived 3 or 4 years ago, a couple of thousand miles away. I guess somebody recorded the location of my Wi-Fi AP then.
Posted by Carlo on September 20th, 2007 at 4:21 pm.