This column is inspired by a Webcast I will present on adding location awareness to your Windows Mobile applications. I have been thinking a lot about this subject over the last few days. With more and more devices having built-in GPS receivers, there is really no excuse to not add location awareness to applications. Of course, there must be a good reason to add location awareness to an application, but if so, it is very easy to retrieve the current location of a device. Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 devices ship with the GPS Intermediate Driver. This driver abstracts actual GPS hardware from application developers, allowing applications to work with any GPS hardware. To make use of the GPS Intermediate driver from inside managed code, a managed wrapper is available in the Windows Mobile SDK samples.

Location awareness can bring a wealth of additional functionality to applications, especially if you thing a little beyond route planners. How about automatically keeping track of places you have visited, by sending location information from your mobile device for instance directly to you blog? Or how about using location information to find points of interest in a city you are visiting for the first time. This could typically be an application that combines the processing power of the device with searching information on the Internet. Such an application could make use of Windows Live Services to find information, and use all the hardware of the device, for instance to make a restaurant reservation from within the same application by using phone or text message capabilities. Combining all communication facilities of a Windows Mobile device inside a smart client application can literally open the world for you. We have all tools available to really begin creating killer applications for Windows Mobile devices. What are you waiting for?

Maarten Struys