How Your Location-Aware iPhone Will Change Your Life

There's a lot of speculation as to what we can expect from next week's iPhone announcements, but there's one thing you can be sure of: The iPhone's location-aware features will change your life. Whether that means pinpointing your location on a Google Map (which iPhones already do), tracking your friends when you go out, or giving you a heads-up on the best place to eat within a three-block radius, the location-aware future is bright. Here's how it'll work.

Location-A-What-What?

Apple's iPhone firmware update at the beginning of the year introduced a faux-GPS feature that uses cell tower information to triangulate your position on the iPhone's Google Maps application. You click a button, and a few seconds later it tells you approximately where you are on the map. So far—unless you've jailbroken your iPhone—that's all it can do.

Jailbroken iPhones—and all iPhones after next week—have and will be seeing a slate of location-aware programs that will take advantage of that faux (and possibly true) GPS information to give you all kinds of heads-ups on what's going on in your area. Here's a look at what's to come.

Find a Great Place Nearby

CNet is reporting that the popular online review site Yelp has already slated a location-aware app to plug into their enormous database of business reviews to give you an overview on all the restaurants, clubs, dentists, and mechanics nearby. If you absolutely can't wait for Yelp, you can already find a good restaurant in the neighborhood with StreetFlow, an iPhone application for jailbroken iPhones that allows you to view and contribute to reviews of nearby restaurants. You can even take a photo while you're eating and upload it to give other users a better idea of the ambiance. (Not jailbroken yet? Don't worry, it'll only take 45 seconds.)

Social Networking Goes Hyper-Local

On the social networking front, tons of developers and opportunists are gearing up to help you keep track of your social network in real as well as virtual space. Twinkle, a Twitter application already running on jailbroken iPhones, tracks the location of your tweets and displays the location of all other Twinkle users within anywhere from 1 to 1000 miles. New social networking web sites like BrightKite are cropping up built specifically as location-based networks where you can track your existing friends and make new friends nearby, and if they don't already have an iPhone application in the works, you can bet someone else already does.

Document Where All Your Photos Were Taken

We've given you the rundown on how to geotag your photos—a process that involves embedding location data in your digital photographs—but when you've got a location-aware device taking the pictures, your memories can be automatically geotagged for you. Don't remember where you had that great sushi? Now you can just check the picture.

Google has already begun incorporating geotagged photos in Google Maps, giving users a more personal look at locations than the bird's-eye or even street views can offer. Again, jailbroken iPhone users can already install an application called iFlickr that geotags your photos as you take them and then automatically uploads them to popular photo sharing site Flickr. And since Flickr has geotagging features built in, anyone looking through my photostream can see approximately where I took the picture.

Ugh, the iPhone

I know, I know, you're sick of hearing about the iPhone, it's not the first gadget to do x, y, or z, etc. The upshot is this: The iPhone may not be the first device on the block with location-awareness capabilities (at a minimum, GPS devices have been around and providing similar services for a while now), but it is the device that's going to break location-aware applications into the mainstream. And from a consumer perspective—assuming I take off my tin-foil hat to bask in the glory of useful possibilities—the location-aware tools that will be developed for and made popular by the iPhone will change your life for the better.

If you've got your own ideas on how location-aware technology like we're seeing in the iPhone is going to change the way we shop, communicate, and socialize—or you hate the idea altogether—let's hear about it in the comments. And while you're getting your iPhone on, maybe you'd be interested in checking out my delightful iPhone book.