Friday 6 March 2009

Driving google latitude around

Today I went to Ljubljana and back alone, so I decided to take Google Latitude with me for a ride, to show Ana where I currently am. After exchanging phones and sims (because my phone doesn't support Latitude and data transfer is cheaper on my sim) I set everything up on the phone and started driving. Let me add that the phone I used didn't have a GPS integrated, so I had to rely only on ground transmitters. But it's enough to give an approximation of my whereabouts while driving a longer distance. Anyway, I checked a few times while driving and it was showing my location quite ok. When I arrived at my destination, Ana told me that she couldn't follow me on iGoogle. Soon we found out that was because she had it in Slovene, where Latitude doesn't work yet. So for the way back she set iGoogle to English and could see me. This time I checked my position only once and it was still following me. When I got home I found out that Latitude still thought that I'm far away, at the place where I checked my location. I guess this is because the phone has a sort of a "sleep mode", which it enters after a minute or two of no usage and during this "sleep mode" it doesn't search for my location and send it.
So while the technology is here, there's still a lot of improvement to be done. One of these is to enable Google Latitude to work on my phone (Nokia N70). Please?

As a side note: Though further testing should be done, I think that in Ljubljana Latitude works better than over here in Solkan and Nova Gorica. Here it just shows a big circle over either of the towns, but there it seemed to give a better approximation.