Find Yourself With Your Cell Phone

A few years ago, the FCC mandated that cell phones have GPS capability or some form of location device so that the phone and its operator could be placed in the case of a 911 call. The rule took effect at the beginning of 2007. Nowadays, over one hundred million cell phones in this state have a chip that provides GPS capability and more and more, software services are emerging that put them to use.

GPS stands for Global Positioning Software and it simply means that a prepared device can be placed by the satellites overhead in geosynchronous orbit that are built to recieve GPS signals. While the cell phone companies primarily were reluctant to contribute, they have begun to develop subscription services that present software to help you use the tracking system.

The GPS technology without chimes and whistles simply identifies the location of your cell phone. A techie named Chuck Fletcher developed a freeware program called Mologogo that allows one Mologogo equipped phone to locate other, likewise equipped phones. It is become a method for some thousand cell owners to keep track of each other, but has not moved much beyond that.

Version and Sprint have developed subscription services that will permit your phone to identify your location, complete with overhead map. It is a mobile driving support tool that should enjoy some degree of fame. The cell phone companies have been reserved to offer general access to the GPS feature in their phones, because it can be a sensitive privacy issue - especially if you are somewhere you are not supposed to be.

More short and snappy, however, is the fact that the cell operators observe the GPS technology as a potential earnings center. One way to get driving instructions with a GPS cell phone is to subscribe to a GPS navigation service. Nextel offers two: Televigation's TeleNav and Motorola's ViaMoto. Using the GPS and Nextel's network, TeleNav and ViaMoto can send driving directions to a Nextel phone. If you make a incorrect turn or miss a street, the service detects that you are off the route and new route is intended to put you back on track.

Aside from the basic mapping and position support, if you are a Sprint-Nextel client you can subscribe to a service called Smarter Agent. This GPS supported technology is attached to a real estate database and can give you with information on home sales in the neighborhood where you and your cell phone happen to be located. It will make out which homes have sold in the neighborhood in the only remaining years, and for what cost.