For CNN
(CNN) -- Very soon, the most common phrase transiting through mobile phone networks will no longer be "Where are you?" but "I see you."
Nokia is one of the pioneering mobile-phone manufacturers when it comes to Assisted GPS.
While satellite navigation via Global Positioning System (GPS) have been helping earthbound humans to visualize and plot everything from U.S. military movements to lost hikers since the 1970s, GPS and other mobile location-based services (LBS) have only recently begun to infiltrate our personal handsets.
"Many phone companies offer a cell-based location system," says Lawrence Cheung, principal consultant of the Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC).
"The system works by locating the strongest nearby cell signals that are visible by the device's antenna, which can determine its position with an accuracy of around 200 meters. Hong Kong has about 1,500 cell towers."
Coordinating through the concrete jungle
Location technologies such as Cell-ID and WiFi are especially precious in dense urban areas like Hong Kong's Nathan Road -- where high-rise buildings often block satellites' highly precise "Sky Line of Sight," but where WiFi and cell towers are ubiquitous.
A few mobile-phone makers, including Samsung and Nokia in Asia, as well as Garmin in Europe and Apple's new 3G iPhone, already feature Assisted GPS, which combines several location-based technologies to offer faster, more flexible services such as dynamic maps and photo geo-tagging.
On the entertainment side, the agency Area/code has devised a number of quirky mobile location-based games involving GPS telemetry, Wi-Fi positioning, camera phones, semacodes, multi-players, and even live sharks with GPS units attached to their fins.
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