Track your S60 device from anywhere, or Track your friend N95

[Micky]

Just been reading about this over on WOM

Rob Dunfey from The Spatial Miscellany has had a bit of time on his hands recently, and has come up with a handy way to track himself and his device.

By combining a GPS enabled device, some Nokia beta software, some HTML code and some PHP, he has made himself a workable tracking site that shows where he (or at least his handset) is. He provides a link to a working example of a map of his current location – when we looked his device was either turned off, or he was at work – but this could be great fun to see where he goes in a day. In fact, it could work extremely well for tracking lost/stolen devices, and simply uses available technology without the ‘significant investment’ in hardware that Rob says would be needed otherwise. He has tied it in to Nokia’s Mobile Web Server (MWS), which he is ‘puzzled’ hasn’t grabbed more attention.

Mobile Phone tracking with a Nokia N95 & MWS

How does it work?

The interactive map control and rich mapping data are provided by Google, and require just a handful of lines of JavaScript and HTML.

The latest generation of Nokia mobile phones are 'location aware...they know of their location. Some devices ship with embedded GPS receivers, for example the N95; other devices estimate their location from their proximity to telephone masts.

In addition to location aware mobile phones, Nokia have also released a mobile web server (MWS), a port of teh Apache webserver developed to run on mobile devices. So...just as you might surf to the BBC website, Google website, or this website, you can also surf to web sites hosted on Nokia mobile phones running their mobile web server software. When the web server software is running on the mobile phone, web requests can be made to the phone for its current location, and that's exactly what is happening here.

Using a combination of the Google Maps AJAX implementation and a PHP script, a web request can be made to web server running on the mobile phone; the location of the phone\web server is returned as XML and mapped as a marker on the map opposite.

Demo... Using an N95

The Spatial Miscellany: Mobile Phone Tracking with a Nokia N95



Mobile Web Server