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Symbian DevZone - gate5 Mobile Guide
by Richard Bloor, May 19, 2003
The appeal of mapping applications for the new generation of smartphones is
fairly obvious, however creating a mobile on-demand mapping service still has a
few hurdles to overcome. The German software house gate5 have client software
in the form of their Mobile Guide Software Suite. This week we take a look at this
tool and talk about mobile mapping services with Christof Hellmis, gate5’s Vice
President of Product Development. - Printer Friendly Version
Global Roaming and tri-band capabilities mean the mobile phone has become as
essential to the world traveler as the paper guidebook. The emergence of powerful
smartphones capable running complex software applications makes merging the
guidebook with the phone an appealing use of technology. As a result there are
now several mobile mapping and guide applications on the market. These
applications use one of two methods to deliver information to the customer. The
first uses the phone as a thin client, where mapping and guide information is
delivered on demand over the air from data stored and packaged on a server. The
second approach is to use the power of the smartphone to display and allow the
user to navigate data stored on the phone, with raw map or guide data being
supplied by web download or over the air. gate5 (www.gate5.de) has
adopted this second approach in its Mobile Guide application.
Originally developed in ANSI C for the Pocket PC gate5 Mobile Guide is now built
around a platform independent core, written in C++. “We designed Mobile Guide
Software Suite to use the absolute minimum of OS specific calls,” explained
Christof Hellmis, Vice President Product Development at gate5. “As a result we
are able to port Mobile Guide to platforms like Palm or Symbian relatively easily.”
gate5 recently demonstrated the power of this design approach by creating a
version of Mobile Guide for the Nokia 3650 that they showcased on Nokia’s stand
at this year’s Symbian Exposium. It was this same portability which made
implementing a version for the P800 possible.
The demonstration package for the Sony Ericsson P800 includes a map of London
with various tourist and other information provided by German company Falk,
who we will hear more about shortly. The power of Mobile Guide is obvious from
the first basic exploration of the controls. The jog dial activates the map zoom,
which smoothly takes you from a wide view of London down to individual streets.
Mobile Guide has a comprehensive set of manipulation options including
panning, centering a point of interest and the ability to orientate the map. The
map can also be displayed in 3D. Guide information is supplied on a number of
subjects, hotels, museums and sightseeing attractions amongst others. Layers
depicting car parks or post offices for example are also included. It also includes
address searching and routing functionality. The routing function also integrates
with the guide information so that a route between places of interest can be easily
created.
gate5’s business model for Mobile Guide is as interesting as the application. “We
are a pure B2B technology provider. So we do not plan to create end user
applications under our own brand,” said Christof. “Rather we are partnering with
known travel and mapping brands. You will never see a gate5 guide on the
market. What you will see is similar to the P800 demonstration, a guide marketed
under the Falk brand name, or perhaps for Fodors or Lonely Planet. These are
names which customers know and trust.” Falk is a mapping and media company
based in Germany, they have a patented map folding mechanism and sell in the
region of 7 to 8 million paper maps a year. They also own a number of well know
travel guide brands such as Marc O Polo and Varta.
For gate5 and their media partners the biggest challenge is the supply chain. “Its
currently difficult to start with a pure over the air model. The pricing of mobile
data services makes it very difficult,” said Christof. “Our core application is just
380 Kb in size, but with map and static places of interest content data it can add
up to 1.5Mb so could cost a customer $15 to $20 to download. Potential users are
not very likely to accept these costs so our first versions will be delivered via the
web or CD and uploaded into the user’s phone via a PC. We are also looking at
supplying guides on Memory Stick or MMC cards.”
While supplying the application and data on physical media or via the web
enables gate5 and its partners to deliver to its customers it does not realize many
of the benefits that Mobile Guide could offer. To address these issues gate5 are
acting on two fronts. Firstly they are talking with device manufactures with a
view to getting Mobile Guide pre-installed on the phone hardware. Secondly they
are working with mobile operators and service providers, exploring ways to
delivery map and guide content dynamically. “The architecture of our product is
such that there are several layered components,” explained Christof. “You have
the map in which you can zoom, pan and rotate, you can do address searches
and routing, all as standard functions. On top of that we can supply over the air
content, for example an event guide, so you could have a map of London and
subscribe to a Time Out channel which provides the latest events guide. This type
of content you will want to receive dynamically over the air so it is always up to
date.”
The way in which Mobile Guide has been structured also means that data can be
delivered based on the phones location. “We are discussing with operators the
ability to tie services into Cell Id or GPS information,” said Christof. “This will
enable us to deliver a service where a user will be able to download or
automatically receive area maps and guide information when they arrive in a new
city.”
Another way in which gate5 are wooing operators is through premium messaging
services. These allow a user to request map details to be sent as a MMS, SMS or
email message to guide a friend or colleague to a specific location identified on
their on-board guide. The message could contain a map or information on a
route.
The drawback of a generic application designed for portability is that most early
ports will not necessarily conform to the target platforms User Interface standard.
Porting becomes more challenging when the User Interface does not have the
interface capabilities of your original design platform. Series 60 is therefore
providing gate5 with some challenges. The engine was originally developed for a
device designed for two-handed use using a touch sensitive screen. Series 60 is
designed for single-handed use and does not have a touch sensitive screen. “The
Series 60 User Interface is very impressive and probably because of this Nokia
has very strong design guidelines,” said Christof. “Designing the interface for
Nokia’s one handed model is very challenging for an application like ours. We
obviously would like to bundle our application onto Nokia phones, so our goal will
be to make the application Series 60 compliant. We may however be working with
a brand owner who has specific requirements for their product which are not
100% Series 60 or UIQ compliant so there we will not necessarily work toward
full compliance.”
As gate5 see its Mobile Guide Software Suite as a tool to allow content providers
to delivery their data to consumers they also intend to market Mobile Guide as a
SDK. “We have in fact already licensed Mobile Guide to a German Pocket PC
developer who used it to create a European wide Travelbook for Map&Guide,”
said Christof. “However the current version of the SDK is really perhaps more for
internal use, we need to create more documentation and usage guides before we
can seriously market it. Finding the right development resource is also an issue
and we are looking for good Symbian and C++ developers who could help us
speed up the development process.”
gate5 has a roadmap which together with its partners includes expanding Mobile
Guide’s capabilities to be the basis of on and off board navigation application.
“Eventually Mobile Guide should integrate functionality from simple mapping
through dynamic content to messaging and navigation becoming the ultimate
personal navigator for the end user,” said Christof.
The issues that gate5 are encountering do not solely affect mapping applications.
In some respects creating the application is the easy part. Finding ways to deliver
the application and its data to consumers in a way they perceive as value for
money while at the same time providing an appropriate return to the mobile
operator, application and data supplier, is perhaps the biggest challenge to
growing the mobile data market.
gate5 Mobile Guide impressively illustrates the advantages of taking a client
based approach to mobile mapping and guide services. Mobile Guide’s options for
map manipulation, 3D rendition and on-demand pan and zoom would be difficult
to achieve in a thin client application even with G3 network bandwidth. In
addition the infrastructure investments for a client based application are,
according to Christof, as little as a tenth of those for a server based mapping
solution.
Mobile Guide has already been used to create a number of offline and
downloadable guides, including the Falk City Guide PocketPC 2003/2004 edition
launched in November last year. They are currently working with partners to
launch cradle sync based services for Palm devices in June. A mobile guide for
Symbian Devices from a well-known brand is expected to be commercially
available in July/August 2003.
If you would like more information about the Mobile Guide SDK please contact
gate5 on mailto:info@gate5.de. The P800 trial version will be available shortly for
download at http://www.gate5.net/p800/
About the WDN Symbian Editor, Richard Bloor:
Richard Bloor is a freelance writer and editor with 18 years experience in the IT industry as a developer, analyst and latterly Project Manager with a particularly focus on software testing. Richard has been involved with the Symbian OS since 1995 and has been writing about it for the last 3 years.
Richard is also an associate with System Architecture consultancy Equinox of Wellington, New Zealand.
Richard can be reached at symbian@wirelessdevnet.com.
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