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At your fingertips
LIU BAIJIA
2005-05-30 06:15

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-05/30/content_446770.htm

Who would have thought falling in love and dating that special girl would be so difficult? Certainly not Luo Shengong.

But that has been the case. The 31-year-old editor with a Beijing-based publishing house has been racking his brains in recent weeks trying to find suitable places to entertain and dine with his new girlfriend.

Luo strives to take his companion to new and exciting places on each date. But that is not as easy as it seems, even in a large city such as Beijing. It means Luo must do a lot of homework including surfing the Internet to find interesting places to go and things to do.

He hopes, one day, he will be able to get that from his cellphone rather than sitting in front of a large monitor and clicking a mouse.

That day may be closer than Luo realizes.

Han Shiming, chief executive officer of Beijing GeoKing Info Co Ltd, says his company launched, last December, a mobile map service with China Mobile.

GeoKing, one of China's three authorized electronic map information providers, is China Mobile's only geological information system (GIS) partner.

The system is fairly straightforward. Cellphone users downloads a map into their handset. When they want to locate a place, person or object, they send a message to China Mobile's servers, then they receive a message containing location information. The location will then be displayed on their mobile phone.

The service was launched, as a trial, last December. Now, 26 smart phones support the service, and there are eight applications including a city guide, garage and automobile maintenance sites and an atlas on the platform.

Last February, China Mobile and Geoking promoted the Map@handset service during the Series 60 Challenge 2005 Awards, an international competition of value-added services on the Symbian smart phone platform. The service was one of the three out of 60 competitors top award winners.

Despite growing support, the service, scheduled to be launched in March for commercial use in China, was postponed in Beijing by China Mobile's Beijing branch due to a change in the billing system.

Bandwidth, however, may be a bigger barrier.

A mobile version of Beijing's map is about 800 kilobytes, but the data transmission speed of the current 2.5G mobile communications network is about 20 kilobits per second. It usually takes minutes to download such a map.

"The experiences of many users have not been pleasant, and that is the biggest headache for us," says Han.

He pins his hopes on the coming third-generation (3G) mobile communications network and WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access), a major 3G standard that has a data transmission speed of 384 kilobits per second, in theory, and, in practice, 200 kilobits per second.

At that time, downloading a Beijing map will take a few seconds, which is much more acceptable.

Han says his firm is revising its map software to divide the maps into different tiers, so users will not have to download a whole map at one time. That will save downloading time, and makes it more comfortable for users.

GeoKing has been working, this year, with China Mobile's provincial subsidiaries in Hubei, Hunan and Henan to demonstrate the services to customers.

Besides relying on the 3G network, combining with the GPS (global positioning system) technology is another option for the GeoKing mobile map services.

China Mobile is expected to push its Assistant GPS (AGPS) service more aggressively, which has an error rate of 10 to 50 metres.

Beijing has installed such devices in more than 20,000 new taxis this year. The devices will eventually be installed in another 10,000 taxis.

At present, the taxi drivers only receive longitude and latitude information, which is virtually useless to the drivers, as they cannot identify locations from that information.

In future, Han says, the drivers will be able to download maps and obtain information about their locations when they enter new areas.


(China Daily 05/30/2005 page8)