14 DAY TRIAL // N82 owners should be happy, as Nokia prepares a firmware upgrade for this Nseries super-phone, upgrade that will be released in a month or so to bring, first of all, geotagging capabilities. "Geotagging for the N82 will be available in Q1 2008 through a firmware update," said the N82 Product Manager, quoted on the official S60 blog.
Basically, geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification data (like latitude and longitude coordinates or even place names) to different media content. In the case of a camera mobile phone, all the pictures taken with it can show the exact location of the place where they were made. Of course, if a user doesn't want this, the feature can be easily turned off from the camera settings.
As a sort of an extra note - geotagging will come as default feature in Nokia N78, planned to hit the market in the second quarter of 2008. Also, Garmin nuvifone, the first handset from the GPS devices producer, will offer geotagging too when available (in the second half of the year).
Back to Nokia N82, for those who don't know too much about it, the handset is 3G-enabled and offers a wide range of evolved features, including Wi-Fi, GPS, A-GPS function, TV out and a 5 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, xenon flash, auto focus and video recording in VGA format at 30 fps.
There's no word yet about other improvements that the firmware update will bring to N82, but there will surely be more besides geotagging, since it's said so on the official S60 forum.
Those who want to get a better idea about how geotagging works (even if they don't own a N82, but they have any other GPS enabled S60 3rd Edition phone) can try the Nokia Location Tagger application, available for free on the Nokia Beta Labs website, at this address. If you don't find it too user-friendly you shouldn't worry, because the geotagging features packed in N82 will be way more simple to use. Just wait for the firmware update.