At Geneva I picked up a leaflet on the Q stand that talked about the postioning feature. Seemed to me that the Q had the capacity to do that before SnapTrack?
There are lots of ways to do cell phone position determination so perhaps they did. But if so, I am unaware of it. Maybe it was even SnapTrack.
So I was wondering about all the markets for this facility.
Well, first, the SnapTrack system works very differently from the most straightforward GPS or non-GPS systems:
1) It works very quickly, and thus does not need to be continually tracking position just so in an emergency it can tell the operator where the user is.
2) It does not inherently involve the cell system. Cell triangulation implicitly involves the cell system computing the handset's location. The handset in a Snaptrack system could, in theory, do its own precise location calculations, and all the cell system would know was the general location based on the cell in which the handset resides. (Note that in the SnapTrack documentation there is an implication that the handset sends the processed satellite timing info back to the cell system to calculate the position.)
These considerations, especially #1, mean that the technology is less likely to be abused. For instance, it isn't as likely that the system will be streaming local ads to the handset, although it could still be used to request local ads. But in the vein of finding new uses, there is at least one that is in the big brotherish category: Part of LWIN's Cricket strategy is to target giving a cell phone to little Johnny and Suzy. Imagine giving the parents, who are paying the bill, the ability to know where their kids are.
Clark |
