Friday, September 14, 2007

GPS Capable Laptop


According to Engadget, Asus claims to have made the "world's first mainstream notebook PC with integrated GPS capability." That particular distinction goes to the company's new U3S laptop, which relies on NXP Software's swGPS system for navigation duties. Among other things, NXP's system does all the necessary GPS signal processing entirely in software, which not only allows it to be much smaller, but also opens up the possibility of fairly significant software upgrades (including support for Galileo if the Europeans gets the system going within the lifetime of the laptop). Just don't expect "mainstream" to mean "cheap," with the laptop set to run €2,300 (or $3,200) when it's released later in September.

Now if only the GPS data from the microphone or camera is automatically added to the metadata about where the script is written. Just t5hink of how this could be used for journalists working in the field - and indexing their material automatically for later searches from the archives.

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