At 01:13 PM 6/27/2004, Jack Lloyd wrote:

On Sun, Jun 27, 2004 at 01:01:53PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:

...

Do any of them let _you_ see the GPS results (which would be useful), or are they only available to Big Brother and maybe advertisers?

Not as far as I know. The cheaper ones certainly don't, it's possible the more expensive ($300+) models do allow this but I have seen nothing advertising such a feature.

Sigh. It probably doesn't even cost them anything - it's just another user interface menu item. (I suppose that's not strictly true - if I were trying to build a GPS Big Brother feature into cellphones for minimum cost, I guess I'd probably look at having the phone just take satellite readings and forward them to a central site for calculations, to avoid having to put any extra computing support into the machine. Don't know if that's a win or loss cost-wise.)

I think the best bet for something like that is to get a Treo (which don't have GPS built in), then get a GPS card for it.

I've already got a GPS, but I seldom carry it around unless I'm camping - it's old, so it's too clunky.