One of the problems with making mobile phones which use new technologies is that you can’t be sure how well they will work or how much people will like them.

Too many people who’ve not used GPS think of it as a magic technology which knows where you are to within your socks all of the time. Car satnav systems don’t help the preconception either. Many systems use wheel tracking and maps. If you know roughly where a car is and can spot it going around a corner you can calculate the exact position. GPS only comes into play for the initial rough stages or if you drive somewhere unmapped. Besides locating a car which is pretty much always out of doors and in the middle of a road is the stuff GPS is good at. It was after all built for things that work in open spaces – tanks and missiles.

We’ve seen some massive failures in the mobile world with iMode (outside of Japan), Push to talk and WAP. The two biggest successes – Ringtones and text messaging – were not really planned, they just seemed like a good idea at the time.

One technology which is yet to fly or fail is the location based service. To some extent we’ve had this since the dawn of GSM with Cell Broadcast, it would be perfectly possible for the cells in a supermarket, shopping centre or sports stadium to use Cell Broadcast for local information. The fact that they don’t must tell us something about the lack of a latent need.

At Mobile World Congress 2009 the GPS special feature was the advent of Geotagging with the Sony Ericsson C702, and Nokia N96 and 6220 Classic. It’s a great use case for GPS because it plays to the strengths of the technology and gives a real user benefit. Over 80% of calls are made indoors – and GPS can take ages to get a fix. Geotagging works because most pictures are taken outside and in an environment where the phone won’t spend most of its time in your pocket. Traditionally GPS is seen as a technology for tracking missing children. It’s rubbish for the former because kids tend to put phones in their pockets and that’s enough for the GPS signal to disappear – along with the kid. But make it an enabler for the kid hooked on Flikr and it becomes something special. But even then it’s just a nice thing to have and not become a must-have.

We need to get more inventive about how we use location based services and GPS. And we need to understand the differences between the two. There are already some great applications such as a golf caddy which knows where you are on the links by GPS and has a database which knows where the pin is and can recommend a club. Or a telemetry system for cars which does performance testing and can even calculate the g-forces pulled through a corner – although this assumes you don’t slide and requires a system that polls the satellite ten times a second as opposed to the once a second phones use.

We might not be able to know ahead of time how much people will like or use new features in their phones but we can provide the enablers and see what they do with them.