I believe that you are only half right. “Locative services” doesn’t *necessarily* mean GPS but it often does, as in the case of the Treo and many other cell phones it. You can turn off the “location” feature on a Treo which disables the GPS receiver and then Sprint, for example, uses triangulation as a back up.

But, it seems you can use the GPS on the 700 anymore than on the 650. Wheww. Gadget envy narrowly averted.

It seems that Sprint and other carriers want to sell you the location data that the cell phone you own generates.

http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/28/telenav-gps-comes-to-sprint/

(Don’t tell me about how the cell phone company subsidies the cost of the phone because if I leave my contract early my carrier charges a flat fee that covers the cost of the subsidy–a cost which is not, I might add, pro-rated based on how long I’ve had the contract which is a kind of damages clause that some think is illegal based on California law regarding contracts.)

There is a thread at treocentral about the AGPS and its possible availability for Location Based Services.

“http://discussion.treocentral.com/showthread.php?t=66803″

Locative services != GPS. It uses triangulation with the cell towers (which have long/lat data) to pinpoint a rough location. It’d be nice if they opened an API to it, but I don’t see it happening soon. I think you can get zipcode from the tower in the API though.

My dream device would have GPS to do geoloc on the pictures I take, update my location on my blog, etc. Some of the cheapo Nextel phones can do that, it seems silly that my 600+ PPC can’t.

Access a mySQL server, update a record and then send the order to backup the database into an specific FTP server which you can later access to confirm it has the backup file and download into internal memory of handheld.

I can do it with Windows Mobile 2003 without extra software to install.

And yet my Treo 650, like most newer cell phones including the 700, has GPS already as part of the 911 location service, but apparently the cell phone companies won’t let Palm give Treo users access to the location data the phone is generating–or it is possible that Palm decided to withhold this feature on its own, but this seems less likely.

I’m not sure if the GPS data generated by the palm is as accurate as that from an external device like Tom Tom or Garmin, but it would still be very useful to have access to for basic location applications. It seems outrageous that cell phone vendors are such an oligopoly that Palm has to give into their whims–as proven with the way cell phone companies cripple the bluetooh compatibility.

Thanks,
John
http://www.deliveryblog.com/