Wednesday, June 20, 2007 10:06 AM Central Time
Posted by Justin
I have been traveling quite a bit in the last couple of months. I don't normally travel with any type of GPS which means that if I am traveling to a city that I am not familiar with, it can make it difficult to find places to eat or other venues without a little driving around.
Windows Mobile 6 ships with the Live Search application which allows you to track your location with GPS. You can also see traffic information and search for locations. As far as usability, I think the app is poorly constructed and difficult to use.
After see the commercial for the iPhone that showed the current location on a map, and a search for "seafood" which yields a number of results around your location with the closest highlighted. The mapping looked familiar, and I actually believe it is using Google.
I did some searching around and found that Google Maps Mobile is available for the Windows Mobile platform. You can find more info here.
Live Search has the option to configure for GPS so if you have a GPS onboard your phone, or are using a Bluetooth GPS you can take advantage of it by selecting the COM port that it is configured for.
Google Maps doesn't have an option for that. It actually uses the GPS settings which are controlled through the Windows Mobile settings. Unfortunately it seems that T-Mobile removed the GPS configuration option.
I did more searching and found a good article on how to make the required registry changes to get things working with Google Maps for Mobile.
I imported the CAB file from the article and GMM started working immediately. GMM works just fine without a GPS and is actually more functional and easy to use; the addition of having a GPS is just gravy.
Give it a try and see what you think!