14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has just announced the availability of a new service for its BlackBerry users, namely Geolocation, which is being released as part of the company's Locate Service. According to the leading smartphone designer, the new feature is meant to offer a location fix within a matter of seconds via information provided by the nearby cell tower. Those who heavily rely on the GPS function of their devices would certainly appreciate the new solution, especially since it is not dependent on the actual GPS receiver on the handset.
“Users can be indoors with no GPS coverage, but your app will still be able to guide them to restaurants or points of interest (POI) around them. Although the accuracy of the fixes obtained from the Geolocation service may not always be as high as with GPS, it has use cases for apps that require highly accurate GPS fixes as well as apps that do not. Apps that require high accuracy can use this service to quickly show the user an approximate location while it waits for a more accurate location fix using GPS. This can offer a huge user experience improvement. For applications that do not require high accuracy, this service can be leveraged as a simple yet effective mechanism to provide location information,” a recent post on the BlackBerry Developer's Blog reads.
According to the said blog post, those interested in benefiting from the new Geolocation service would only need to ask for a location fix through the LocationProvider or BlackBerryLocationProvider via the appropriate Criteria, or BlackBerryCriteria for the Cellsite mode. In order to work as it should, the feature would need for the BlackBerry Application Platform v5.0 or higher to be installed on the handset. The Locate Service can be easily combined with the BlackBerry Maps Service in order to offer a wider range of features, including navigation directions, POIs, and more. Developers interested in the use of these services can find all the necessary info on RIM's website.
Existing Geocoding functionality delivered by the Locate Service in BlackBerry Device Software has been improved too. The said blog post notes that developers can now ask for reverse geocoding too, in addition to the previously offered features. What reverse geocoding is all about includes the capability to convert latitude and longitude to an address. “One [feature] of the new reverse geocoding functionality is that you can ask for contextual location information at a variety of levels from the street address to the state depending on the granularity required by your application. As a developer, you are able to take advantage of this service with a single method call while we do all the heavy lifting behind the scene,” the said blog post reads.