Slashgeo

The location capabilities for the iPhone has been discussed quite a few times here, see related stories below, but also this discussion on whether the iPhone needs GPS capabilities or not. Now Mapperz informs us a third-party GPS add-on for the iPhone and iPod Touch will start shipping in February at the price of 89$US. Great news: the software used is open source, bad news: it requires your iPhone/iPod Touch to be 'jailbroken' (maybe this will change with the upcoming SDK?). The description: "The iphone locoGPS module allows jail broken iphones to finally have GPS functionality. This module is in development and will be shipping in February. All software is open source and more applications are being written every day. The locoGPS module gives you the ability to explore all the benefits of GPS from a device that is small enough to put on a keychain." There's also Google's My Location new feature which works on the iPhone now.

A couple days ago, news about an iPhone GPS was announced. Today, AnyGeo reports about the upcoming iPhone firmware upgrade which gives the iPhone's Google Map's application position triangulation capability using cell towers, essentially turning it into a free, bad accuracy GPS. For links to movies and more articles of the system in action, head on over to AnyGeo. If you're interested in the video, the Google Maps portion is shown at ~5 minutes in this link.

From the GeoThought blog : "Well, the widely reported rumors were true, and today Apple released the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone which provides location awareness, using cell phone triangulation. My first quick test had a much better result than I expected: I am at home in my loft in downtown Denver and the center of the cross hair is pretty much exactly where I would have placed it on the map"

For more information, and screenshots, head on over to the GeoThought blog.

Here's a few recent Apple related geonews. First is the capacity for Mac owners to run Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D using the new VMWare Fusion: "Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D doesn’t yet run in a Mac OS X browser. Until recently, your only option was to install a copy of Windows on a different partition using Apple’s Bootcamp tool, and boot into it. [...] Sometime in the last few months, however, competitor VMWare came out with an update of their virtualization tool for Mac, Fusion, that does support VE3D." Additionally, The Map Room shares a complete guide to geotagging photos on the Mac. And finally, APB informs us Apple is encouraging iPhone users to help update the Skyhook wifi location database. On a side note, mentioning Apple products looks reasonable since they are increasingly popular even within geospatial professional, with now 14% of computer sold last February and almost a monopoly on portable music devices. Related previous stories added below, including an old one on running ArcGIS on MacOS X, but I admit omitting the numerous previous stories on geotagging photos.

Anonymous Voxel writes "Geopedia is an application for iPhone which shows Wikipedia articles with locations near you. Geographical coordinate support in Wikipedia is still being developed but enough people have been adding location data that there are thousands of points defined."

MacRumors.com offers a nice summary on the development of turn by turn GPS navigation software for the iPhone. From MR: " MSNBC recently spoke (via MacDailyNews) with several GPS manufacturers about their plans to develop a turn-by-turn GPS solution for the iPhone. While the manufacturers were unable to provide many details about their plans, TomTom reasserted that they do have GPS navigation working on the iPhone and that it works well [...]" See also some selected previous iPhone stories below.

Slashdot runs a story about geographically locating any WiFi router by its MAC address. Their summary: "SkyHook Wireless has been wardriving the US for years creating a huge database mapping wireless routers' MAC addresses to their physical locations. They provide an minimally documented API (doc here) which allows anyone to query the database directly for any MAC address. This could potentially allow some malicious individual to find out exactly where you live. Of course for them to get the MAC of your router in most cases will require either being infected with malware or some sort of social engineering attack... Imagine if you got a phishing email that included your home address." See also related stories below.

The Geoweb Guru blog has news about this recent announcement from Mapquest. Here is part of their summary : "MapQuest have just announced an iPhone version of their MapQuest 4 Mobile application. This application performs the usual consumer mobile map activities: eg. find places, give directions, locate "landmarks" (fast food, etc)."