The Missing Mobile Device: A GPS Camera Phone
Before I dive into my argument: Hats off to Walt Mossberg for his column in the June 2 Wall Street Journal, "Wireless Carriers' Veto Over How Phones Work Hampers Innovation." We need people of Mossberg's stature to draw attention to the way U.S. cellular companies are abusing their control of the handset market to keep the latest, most exciting mobile technologies out of consumers' hands. After all, the phone companies will only change their ways if they realize the market is demanding it.
And believe me, a loosening of controls over the ways third-party software can be loaded onto cell phones would be a very big deal. Unless developers get a chance to build upon the full capabilities of today's phones, the features we need and deserve in our mobile phones will be a very long time coming.
Here's the nub of the problem, in Mossberg's words:
In an ideal world, any tech company with a new cellphone, or with software to run on cellphones, should be able to sell it directly to users. These customers would then separately buy plans from the cellphone companies allowing those devices to work on the networks. But that isn't how it works. In most cases, manufacturers must get the network operators' approval to sell hardware that runs on their networks, and carriers don't allow downloading of software onto phones unless they supply it themselves.
A case in point: Software that would capitalize on the geolocation technologies already being built into almost every new phone. Under the FCC's E911 regulations, which are intended to help emergency responders locate people calling 911 from a cell phone, new phones must carry some kind of positioning technology. This transition must be completed by Dec. 31, 2005, but the major carriers began releasing E911-compliant some time ago.
The phones use either satellite-based GPS or radiolocation based on signals from nearby cell towers. In the case of smart phones or what some analysts call "converged devices"--that is, phones that have an internal operating system and can run many different kinds of software--software developers could easily write applications that tap into the data provided by the phones' positioning subsystems. For example, a built-in Web browser might be programmed to send the phone's current latitude and longitude to a local search service similar to Yahoo! Local or Google Maps; search results could then be automatically ranked by physical proximity. But in order to do this developers need open APIs: application programming interfaces, meaning, in this case, protocols for making software communicate with the positioning subsystem.
But the major cellular carriers--Sprint PCS, Verizon Wireless, Cingular,and T-Mobile-- have so far declined to provide such APIs. (This is one of my biggest pet peeves, as I've blogged about before.) This exclusionary policy would be understandable if the carriers were busy rolling out their own location-based services. But they aren't. Mossberg again:
I call these cellphone companies the new Soviet ministries, because they are reminiscent of the Communist bureaucracies in Russia that stood athwart the free market for decades. Like the real Soviet ministries, these technology middlemen too often believe they can decide better than the market what goods consumers need.
The only exception to the Soviet model among the U.S. carriers is Nextel, which offers Motorola phones with GPS navigation functions such as turn-by-turn driving directions. Companies such as Trimble Outdoors make software that Nextel customers can use to link their GPS phones to their PCs. That opens up a whole world of GPS-assisted activities, such as travel planning and geocaching.
Nextel was recently acquired by Sprint. As its iDEN network is phased out and merged into Sprint's PCS network, who knows whether Nextel's traditional openness toward outside developers will persist. But if they're wise, Sprint and its rivals will follow Nextel's example. Adding GPS to the next generation of camera phones would create some very cool things for people to do with their phones.
"Geophotocaching" is one application I have in mind. I'm coining this term to describe what I think would be fun variation on geocaching: Use your GPS phone to navigate to a specific location, prove you were there by taking some creative shots of or from that location with the phone's camera, then upload the geotagged pics directly from the phone to a common photoblog, where geophotocachers could trade comments on each other's work. This would be similar in some ways to virtual caching, and would have the added benefit, unlike regular geocaching, of not interfering with the landscape -- "take only photos, leave only footprints," as the old environmentalist saying goes.
Geophotocaching is already possible without GPS camera phones, but you have to be a bit of a technogeek and do-it-yourselfer to figure it out. For example, freelance developers have put together a couple of different ways to automate the process of attaching latitude and longitude from a dedicated GPS unit to photographs after they've been taken (see Geobloggers). But if a camera phone could drop lat/long information directly into a photo's EXIF metadata, these kludges wouldn't be necessary.
Google Maps is every bit as revolutionary as my first instincts told me. Not because Google invented a new geospatial engine or compiled better data. They didn’t. But simply -- and yet profoundly -- because Google Maps is a framework we can all use to annotate the physical world. In the very near future, billions of people will be roaming the planet with GPS devices. Clouds of network connectivity are forming over our major cities and will inevitably coalesce. The geoaware Web isn’t a product we buy; it’s an environment we colonize. There will always be markets for proprietary data. But the real action will be in empowering people to create their own services, with their own data, for their friends, family, and business associates. Google Maps isn’t just a service, it’s a service factory.
As I've been arguing in this blog, one of the things that makes continuous computing different from older genres of information technology is the fact that it is far more grounded in our physical environments. Thanks to geopositioning technology and open Web development standards, something amazing is happening: the Web is being transformed from a global virtual library into something more like a multimedia map of the world. And it's happening from the bottom up, as people apply their mobile devices in ways the cellular providers haven't even dreamed about. But, as always, they need better, easier-to-use tools, and a GPS camera phone would be a big boon.
I'm going to try to tie all of these themes together in a more felicitous way in my October feature; all thoughts and suggestions about how to make this stuff clearer are welcome.
Addendum 6/6/05: In relation to "geophotocaching," I should have mentioned Microsoft's WWMX project (the WorldWide Media Exchange). The researchers behind the project write: The location where a photo was taken provides clues about its semantic context and offers an intuitive way to index it, even in a very large collection. The combination is powerful, but still not supported well by either the photo-software or camera-hardware industries. We're trying to establish a strong case for these features..." One of the WWMX tools is called "Location Stamper." It matches the time stamps in the EXIF data for your digital images with the tracking data collected by a GPS unit.
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