January 5, 2010
Will a new iPhone bring more innovative location services in 2010?
I stumbled across this brief but interesting PC World article recently, which covers a possible ‘sighting’ of an iPhone 3.0 in the wild. Whilst purely conjecture, it does open up the possibility that we’ll see a new iphone device ship this year that will come with more out-of-the-box location based services, specifically targeted around the GPS and magnetometer functions. No doubt augmented reality applications will play a central part but obviously we’d expect some new level of accuracy and capability for it to stand above an already crowded but still evolving AR landscape for the current generation of iphone and Android handsets.
Given Apple’s history in innovation, I’m excited. I think it would give augmented reality a head-start toward ubiquitous usage across the general public, rather than taking the usual road of 5 years early adoption and fragmentation before reaching critical mass. It may help sort out the current disarray in the myriad of data formats available to support publishing AR information via more notable platforms such as Wikitude and Layar.
Geographically challenged 