The Microsoft MapPoint Mobile Locator

In the past few years, location-based services have become a hot topic for mobile phone developers. Being able to locate your employees in real-time and dispatch them to situations based on their proximity to the situation is fundamental for emergency response teams, delivery services and other mobile service organizations. Microsoft is making serious inroads with these organizations by offering MapPoint Location Service and the Mobile Locator software that runs on your PC or Pocket PC. And, although location-based services are extremely complex to develop and deploy, Microsoft has put an amazingly friendly front-end on it with their new Mobile Locator software.

The Mobile Locator sample application

Microsoft MapPoint Mobile Locator (Mobile Locator for short) is an application available for Pocket PC Phone Edition devices and for Windows 2000 or XP PCs. Mobile Locator works with a Microsoft MapPoint Location Server, allowing users to locate one another and display their locations on the Pocket PC's screen.

Location information is provided by the cellular network using cell sector ID and/or triangulation. GPS is not involved in this system.

Mobile Locator for the Pocket PC packs a variety of powerful features in an impressively small footprint (less than 1 megabyte). When you launch Mobile Locator, a simple start-up screen appears with five options (Fig. 1). The first, labeled "Find a Mobile Contact," lets you find other Mobile Locator users, if they are logged on to the MapPoint Location Server. Note the "Log On" icon at the bottom of the screen. You must be logged on to the server to be visible to other users.

And, you can add people to Mobile Locator's Mobile Contacts list by entering their name, e-mail address, server username, or their mobile phone number. Once entered, you can instantly locate them by selecting their name on the Pocket PC (Fig. 2) or Windows (Fig. 3) version of Mobile Locator.

Figs. 1, 2, 3: The Mobile Locator software for the Pocket PC has a very clean interface that, when paired with a compatible cellular service, will display the real-time location of you and your "buddies" on a map on the Pocket PC or a Windows PC.

In addition to finding other Mobile Locator users, the software can provide a map or directions to a street address, an Outlook contact, a point of interest (e.g. the local zoo), and even local stores and restaurants. The application's Find a Place option displays a map with a pushpin that shows your destination. The Find Directions option displays the route from your current location to a destination. The latter option is incredibly flexible. For example, you set your starting point and destination as: an address in Pocket Outlook, your real-time location, a Mobile Contact's real-time location, a point of interest (like the local zoo) or manually enter an address. Once you've entered the start and end of your trip, you can specify whether the application should calculate the shortest or fastest route.

Like commercial GPS applications, Mobile Locator provides the trip distance and ETA with the driving directions. The sample application I tested did not automatically update the directions to the location as the user moves. However, this could be easily programmed by a developer wishing to deploy this feature.

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