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.


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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