Dave in LA

I was really excited about the My Location feature on the recently released version of Google Maps for Windows Mobile. It uses triangulation from cellphone towers to estimate your location. Depending on how good of signal strength you have and how many towers your phone is talking to it can do a pretty impressive job of finding out where you are. I installed the application a couple months ago and never got the feature working correctly. I kept getting an error from Google Maps saying that “My Location information is temporarily unavailable.” By temporarily they meant, “you will probably have to spend some time searching on Google before this will ever work.” (reminds me of this xkcd)

After some searching and forum reading, I found the answer to my problem. In Windows Mobile, third party applications aren’t allowed full access to the hardware on the phone unless you fiddle with the registry. I’m guessing this is a security feature since it would be pretty easy to write an application to mess with your phone if you wanted to. This means Google Maps can’t do what it needs to do unless you get in there and do some registry tweaking. Luckily, someone has made this process much easier by providing a nice cab file that does all the work for you.

Get the latest version of Google Maps, install that file, then restart your phone. Now when you get off the plane in some random city and need to find the nearest Thai place as quickly as possible, you will have much less searching to do.