Good news for satnav users: you’ll use 12% less fuel than those who insist that their trusty road atlas will get them where they are going.

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Inspired by the exploits of yesterday’s London Marathon runners? It’s never too early to start your training for next year – if you’re anything like us you’ll need all the time you can get. With your GPS-enabled smartphone you can get a little help along the way.

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Over the last year a new use for GPS has emerged that developers could never have expected.

Prompted by a Nokia publicity-seeking stunt (see www.theworldismycanvas.com), users around the world have been using GPS-equipped smartphones to create so-called ‘Position Art’, using the tracklog generated by the software, overlaid onto a map or satellite image, to ‘draw’ a cartoon image in real time

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Geotagging is the process of adding exact latitude and longitude to photos so that they can be shown up later overlaid onto maps or satellite images.

Nokia is leading the way here on its S60 platform, with the free Location Tagger utility (www.nokia.com/betalabs/locationtagger) sitting in the background and jumping in to add current GPS coordinates to any photos that you take – it’s clever too, in that it caches your position for a short period so that photos taken just before jumping on a tube train (for example) still get tagged properly.

Geotagging photos will be commonplace on smartphones of all varieties within 12 months and facilities are already in place to import geotagged photos into the common photo sharing web sites, such as Flickr and Picasa Web.

In each case, there’s the option to view your photos on a schematic or satellite map soon after uploading. Note that in Flickr’s case you have to go into ‘Your account>Privacy and permissions’ and manually enable a couple of settings before geotagging data is used.

You should take privacy seriously, by the way, as you probably won’t want casual browsers seeing location information for photos taken at home (and thus knowing exactly where you live) – usually the solution is to turn off location tagging most of the time and only enable it in your smartphone’s (camera) software when on a specific, interesting trip.

If this all sounds a bit geeky, then you’re wrong – it isn’t. Showing people an interactive map of your holiday (for example), with all your photos as thumbnails in the right locations, so that they can click on just the ones they want and ‘follow their nose’ is a great way to bring your holiday snaps to life.

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Becker are part of the Harman group, more renowned for their in-car audio systems, rather than SatNavs. The Traffic Assist 7977 has inherited some of the companies’ audio heritage, but at the same time it brings to the table Navigon-style Reality view and …

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Satellite navigation might be set to arrive on the Nintendo DS with the launch of a new add-on called Ranger, from Chinese company Fab Chain.

It uses Google Maps and can do 2D and fake-3D map rendering. Ranger is powered by its own battery and can also connect to other devices including laptops.

No word on price or availability; but an interesting concept for the popular handheld games console nonetheless.

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For thousands of years maps have been the best, and only, method of finding your way from place to place.  In the UK we’ve been lucky to have probably the best mapping in the world, and the whole country is covered in maps at scales appropriate to a variety of uses. A road atlas could help you out on roads, but once you set foot off the highway you needed to learn the essentials of how to use a map and compass to determine your position.

The road atlas is rapidly becoming obsolete as sat nav takes over the task of navigation in-car, with voice direction, live monitoring and auto updating maps, but once you start off-road the world of GPS changes.

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