GPS Tracker review

Simon Bisson

We review GPS Tracker, a BlackBerry app that uses the BlackBerry GPS to keep a website updated with your location

Published on Jun 23, 2009

You know where you are, your phone knows where it is. Why shouldn’t you be able to use the later to record the former? After all, we’ve all got digital cameras (especially those built into our BlackBerrys) and we all want to know just where we were when we took our photos. We also want to know just how fast we were on last night’s run, and just how far we ran.

That’s where GPS Tracker comes in, a simple tool that uses the BlackBerry GPS to keep a website updated with your location – along with a track of just where you’ve been.

Once you’ve downloaded the tiny application, with its minimalist user interface, you can go online to the InstaMapper website to register a new device. You’ll find InstaMapper supports most GPS-equipped mobile phones along with BlackBerry. It only uses GPS, so won’t track you using cell tower lookup or Wi-Fi base station location services.

Once you’ve got a device code from InstaMapper you can connect your BlackBerry to the service.

You’ll also need to make sure you’re sending back data at the optimum rate. The default is every five seconds, with a buffer of the last 10 positions.

You’ll probably want to dial that down a bit – GPS accesses can affect battery life significantly, and that much data being sent could affect your connection, especially if you’re using a limited data plan. GPS Tracker runs in the background, so you can just set it going and carry on using your BlackBerry as normal. It’ll even run with the screen blanked and the BlackBerry in a holster or case.

InstaMapper’s online mapping service is useful, but what you’ll really find useful is the raw data, which you can then use with geotagging software to add data to a run route or to a set of photographs. Once you’ve collected a set of data and displayed it online, you can convert it to a track.

The resulting data can be shared online, perhaps as a blog post, using Google Maps. Alternatively you can download it using the popular KML geodata format, or as CSV. These formats are supported by most geotagging and sports and activity logging applications.

GPS Tracker is a simple application which works with the InstaMapper website to give you a simple, easy to use, GPS tracking solution. Extracting data for use with other applications isn’t as easy as it might be, but the results are worth the effort, and easily match those provided by more expensive geologging hardware.