I was chatting with a friend about the upcoming 3G iPhone and we got stuck on the topic of GPS for a while. Obviously GPS isn’t a new idea. Plenty of people are perfectly happy with their in-car GPS systems or even the current capabilities of their GPS enabled phones. There’s no real added value for current GPS owners to switch over to the iPhone specifically based on the hardware.
Apple’s strategic advantage will be in the applications that are created with live tracking GPS in mind. Apple already demoed Loopt.com; an app that tells you your friend’s exact location, recent pictures, little messages and alerts you when they are nearby.
The possibilities are so ridiculously intriguing. For instance, imagine twittering, blogging, or updating your Facebook / Myspace status with not only a message, but also your current location automatically.
Locating nearby restaurants is nothing new for GPS, but imagine a one click Yelp.com application that automatically recommends the top 3 nearby Italian restaurants based on user reviews and according to your GPS location.
Imagine a music application that offers a list of upcoming, nearby concerts based on the type of music you keep on your iPhone (or your Pandora.com likes / dislikes) and your current GPS location.
Imagine being in an unfamiliar city and desperately needing to find a public restroom. One button click on the iPhone, your GPS location could be sent to Mizpee.com and a list of the closest toilets (along with reviews if you are a clean freak) would pop up along with directions to each.
Imagine not only all of your pictures being geo-tagged with locations due to GPS, but also tossed into a map-like trip diary documenting vacations as you travel or even the mundane details of your life; all via a one click social networking app on the iPhone.
Imagine sitting at work and hitting a one click Craigslist search that allows you to find nearby apartments (obviously to save on $4 a gallon gas) based on your current GPS location.
The point I’m trying to make is that the iPhone is going to make this type of techy GPS stuff incredibly easy to do. Blackberry already has plenty of GPS apps, but they aren’t for the casual phone user; they are mostly for the tech-heads. Ideally, iPhone users will just load up the App store with one click, download & install a GPS application within a few seconds and away they go. The streamlined process will ultimately increase the number of users and bring these sort of live tracking applications into the mainstream very quickly.
