Satellite navigation using the internet
I had this thought. Do any of the “driving directions” places, like the AA or MSN MapPoint or Multimap allow you to input GPS waypoints? Alternatively, is there anything on the net which translates GPS waypoints into postcodes? If there is, then if you can pipe a net connection into your car somehow (GPRS is the obvious solution here) then you’ve got satellite navigation, because you just keep fishing your current location out of GPS and then query the site for how to get to where you’re going.
Of course, it’d cost a fortune in connectivity bills, and you’d be better off just buying a real satnav system for four hundred quid or so, but that’s not the point.
“but that’s not the point.” Yes it is. :)
20 hours later
fizz: hack value. I’m not actually going to do this. However, in an increasingly wired world I’m expecting a point where there’s a national free wireless network (or, at the least, a national paid-for wireless network that everyone is already subscribed to, so it doesn’t cost you any extra to do stuff like this). At that point, solutions like this become a reality. If I was writing something on my home PC, it pretty much gets to assume that it can query the internet for stuff whenever it wants, and that opens up a whole extra list of stuff that standalone applications just can’t do; that isn’t yet available for mobile devices, but it will be.
21 hours later