What are the best mobiles for LBS? To answer this questions I have taken four phones from different manufactures and compared them. In my opinion following issues are important if you want to use a mobile for LBS applications:
- buid-in GPS
- large screen size and resolution
- fast internet connection
- good usability and operating system which allows to design own applciation easily
- battery life
- prize
Maybe there are some more criteria to rate phones for their LBS suitability.
Phones |
HTC P3700 |
Nokia N96 |
Iphone 3G |
SE Xpedia |
| buid-in GPS | A-GPS
|
A-GPS
|
A-GPS
|
A-GPS
|
| Screen Size | 2.8″, 640×480
|
2.8″, 240×320
|
3.5″, 480×320
|
3.0″, 800×480
|
| Internet. Conn. | GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA/HSUDA
|
GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA
|
EDGE/HSDPA
|
GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA/HSUDA
|
| Prize (EUR) | 485
|
TBA | TBA | TBA |
| Size | 102×51x11.5
|
103×55x20
|
115×62x12.3
|
110×53x17
|
| Batery (sp/by) | 270min/385h
|
150min/200h
|
300min/300h
|
TBA
|
| OS / HCI |
Windows Mobile 6.1
|
Symbian S60
|
MacOS X
|
Windows Mobile 6.1
|
| Ranking |
2 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
I know this is a very limited evaluation. But for this four phones my winner is the iPhone 3G because of the great suitability and the mobile MacOS X SDK.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Might be worthwhile to bring in the developer perspective as well: supported application platforms (Java ME, Symbian, Compact Framework, iPhone SDK, etc.), APIs (Location APIs, programmatic access to CellID, “extras” like access to orientation sensors, etc.)
Would be great if this could grow into a long and comprehensive list of devices and capabilities
Yes this might be useful. I know the list is not very comprehensive and I hope I can find some time to do this. The topic of applciation platforms and SDKs seems even more interesting these days, due to the recent improvements. Maybe I can combine this topic with my master thesis where I have to evaluate a mobile platform for LBS.