Stowe Boyd Gets Direction

The nice folks at Nokia shipped me some new toys to fool with, one of which distinguished itself immediately as something I’d like to keep in my kit forever: a bluetooth-enabled GPS unit, designated the LD-1W.

I have a real interest in geoloco apps — like Plazes.com — but without a GPS unit, I have been unable to actually determine my lat long coordinates, except through various laborious online tools that translate street addresses. Fine, so long as you know where you are. And of course, any sort of GPS directions application requires a GPS gizmo.

So I installed a trial of Wayfinder software onto a Nokia N90, and tried connecting to the device. Seemed to work, but no dice. Then I remembered (duh!) that the GPS unit needs to be outdoors to communicate with the satellites it uses to determine coordinates on the Earth. I wandered down the street, and captured this screenshot.

[Getting the picture posed small problems: had to use a second camera phone to take th epicture, and of course the day was intensely bright. I had to step under a tree to take the photo, and even then the glare made it next to impossible.]

There doesn’t seem to be an integration of the GPS data into the Nokia Lifeblog software, but that would be a cool option: tag stamping blog posts from the phone, whether photos, video, or text, with lat and long.