Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

I keep trying to focus on other things, but the siren song of LBS just keeps calling me. I'm tired of waiting around for the phone manufacturers and carriers to implement JSR 179 and GPS, and open up the locative wonders that'll come with it. I guess I could jump over to Nextel, who seems to be the only U.S. carrier that has JSR 179 working (with certain Moto phones), but I'm locked in a two-year cingular contract. So it goes.

So I broke down and bought a little Bluetooth GPS device. It's a lot smaller than I expected, since it's only meant to communicate via Bluetooth and doesn't need a display screen. It's surprisingly hard to find these in stores around here in Silicon Valley. Most places (Fry's, BestBuy, Sporting Goods stores) carry the standard GPS devices with the simple screens and no bluetooth, but the only place that had what I was looking for was CompUsa. I guess I could have bought one online, but I'm already tired of all this waiting and wanted one NOW.

I'm interested in experimenting with GPS because I'm not sure I understand it as well as I should. I have a vision of interesting LBS uses that's probably just like everyone else's (where's my friend, where's the nearest gas station, what's a good restaurant nearby), but there's much more innovative possibilities out there that I don't think I can grok until I actually start using a web-connected GPS device.

I remember going to a Cornell alumni talk where Jeff Hawkins was telling stories of the early days when he was inventing the Palm Pilot, and he would carry around a block of wood shaped like the palm pilot to fully understand how it would/could be used. I think this is something that I need to do with my new macgyvered GPS phone to really understand the possibilites.

I just read a great article today by Peggy Anne Salz called Follow The Leader that talks about this sort of user-driven innovation vs. approaching things from a developer-centric perspective.

More interesting things to come on this front (hopefully)...