How do Nokia Maps find my current location?

[the00ball]

Hi peaple,

I have a doubt about Nokia Maps App. How do Nokia Maps find my current location? Do it use jsr179 to do that?

[symbianyucca]

you could check: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Commu...PI_for_Java_ME and the MyLocationMap part in there.

[the00ball]

Thanks,

But I'm talk about Nokia Maps application. Do you know if it use jsr 179 to determine the position or other way?

[symbianyucca]

That would be rather impossible to know without actually having the application sources available, anyway, for normal end user it should not matter on which way it is getting the position, so why it is important to you ?

[the00ball]

You are right,


I ask that, because I'm working in a project where my application need determine my current position. Well, the JSR179 fix my problem, but the customer told me to forget it and find other way to determine the position. Due, I ask you about Nokia Maps application, if you confirm that his use this JSR, I may use this information for convince my customer use the same.

[symbianyucca]

I don't think there would be any ways on checking that, basically the Maps application is not open source application, so getting to know internal workings of it, is generally not possible.

Anyway, if your customer thinks that standard APIs should not be used, then ask them to provide alternative way.

[the00ball]

Thanks,

I asked him about an alternative way to provide location and he told me to try use cell ID property with signal power to calculate the timing advance. Do you thing if is possible to use these informations?

[skalogir]

On application level as developer, if you work with Java, and you target Nokia devices, there is no other way to determine your current position (i.e. get a set of coordinates), unless you use the Location API (JSR-179). Cell-ID (network based) location retrieval is also part of JSR-179 as you can see here.

What he might have meant is to retrieve the cell-id itself. This can be done by using the Nokia Specific System property "com.nokia.mid.cellid" (thus bypassing JSR-179). But from the cell-id, in order to get a set of coordinates, you would need a mapping of cell-ids to a pair of latitude and longitude for each operator. From the same location, using a different operator would result in retrieving a different cell-id. Databases that perform this kind of mapping are not given publicly by the operators. JSR-179 does this mapping for you and instead of the cell-id, it gives you the set of coordinates.