Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Mobile Phone Point And Click In Japan

From International Herald In Japan, phone has the answer

If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today, you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at.

The new service is made possible by the efforts of three Japanese companies and GeoVector, a small American technology firm, and it represents a missing link between cyberspace and the physical world.

The phones combine satellite-based navigation, precise to within no more than 9 meters, or 30 feet, with an electronic compass to provide a new dimension of orientation. Connect the device to the Internet and it is possible to overlay the point-and-click simplicity of a computer screen on top of the real world.

In the United States, carriers have the option of a less precise locating technology that calculates a phone's position on the basis of its proximity to cellphone towers, a method precise only to within 100 meters or so. Only two American carriers are using the GPS technology, and none have announced plans to add a compass.

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