Word on the street is that it's overpriced for real utility. I mean,
come on, it takes a few minutes to fire up the GPS and acquire a signal,
and during this whole kludgy and time consuming user experience, you
keep thinking about the GPS use charge piled on top of the packet
charges, etc.
I'm not a marketing person, but it seems to me the right way is to have
the GPS freely available, and use it as a value-add in order to drive up
packet usage.
The user should also be able to use the GPS in a way that doesn't
require packet charges, such as acquiring the lat/long (which itself is
not really valuable without the added services), speed, etc. Then the
user develops familiarity with the feature and can feel safe about
jumping into the pay-for-use services.
From a UI perspective, there are a lot of interesting permissions
features built into the phones that make the applications you described
possible. For example, the trucking company doesn't want the employee
turning OFF the GPS tracking, but the consumer doesn't want other people
to turn ON tracking without their permission.
Dunno if this information helps, but I'd love to see some discussion on
LBS...
Cheers,
Joe
> has anyone subscribed to toshiba's e-location service? according to the
> explanation (sorry in Japanese) and the 体験版,
> for an initial fee of 1000 yen, 300 yen a month, and 30 yen per use, the
> service will display the phone's location on a map. the number of
> applications is probably huge; from trucking companies to dispatching
> maintenance workers to finding your friend.
> cheers,
> jeff funk
>
> http://www3.toshiba.co.jp/lcs/eLocation/eLoc_srv.htm#s07
Received on Tue Nov 12 19:29:00 2002