iTWire - iPhone gets 'upgraded' again: GPS, video and plenty more

iPhone gets 'upgraded' again: GPS, video and plenty more

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 17 December 2007
Page 1 of 3 GPS and video recording capabilities have come to the iPhone at last, as iPhone users enjoy an ever increasing range of capabilities on a device that was originally meant to be ‘closed’! Register now to win a Canon EOS 500D Even though Steve Jobs launched the iPhone as a closed device, with an SDK eventually announced to ship Feb ’08, developers have chosen not to wait and have broken through the barriers to create all kinds of interesting programs for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The latest of these is a basic form of video capture that promises 15-30fps+ and an unlimited file length, but I’ll get to that in a moment – first up is the new GPS module that plugs into the dock connector of the iPhone. Created by PartFoundry, the module is called “locoGPS for the iPhone” and comes with open source software allowing programmers easily to create apps that take advantage of the live GPS information when available. The PartFoundry site linked above shows a video of the GPS module plugged into an iPhone where after about a minute, the GPS locks onto the required number of satellites and is able to display GPS co-ordinates numerically as well as displaying them on the iPhone’s inbuilt Google Maps program. Uncovered by Gizmodo US, the locoGPS plugs in the iPhone’s dock connector, and has an essential mini-USB passthrough to allow charging of the iPhone to continue while the GPS module is plugged in. Although the video shows a wide and thin module without a cover, the PartFoundry website shows the module as it would commercially appear, with a mostly black outer casing. It will come with a ‘stylish plastic enclosure’ which you could easily attach to your keychain. It won’t be available commercially until Feb ’08, at a price of US $89, but it features a 20-channel SiRF Star III chip for fast GPS lock-on, updates at 1 sample per second and 5m-10m accuracy amongst other features and works on jailbroken 1.1.2 iPhones, with iPod Touch support being worked on. While Google Maps does have routing software, letting you plan a route from your location to a destination, and being able to track your GPS location as you drive to your destination, there is no turn-by-turn voice navigation system that is alerting you to upcoming turns, nor is there a system to automatically recalculate your route should you take a wrong turn. This shows just how pre-version 1 the whole system is, given the sophistication of the latest GPS sat-navs now available with touch-screens all their own, although with an open source programming interface a standard GPS program could easily be created for the iPhone. Of course Google may have a navigation upgrade for Google Maps one day in the future too, seriously challenging any third party efforts created today, but with Google anything is possible. So, GPS has arrived, and will only get better, until Apple just includes it in the iPhone 2... now what about video recording on the iPhone – and what about some other cool iPhone apps? Read onto page 2 for more... << First page < 1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>