Nokia Locate Sensor has just made its debut at CES 2009. The brainchild of the folk over at the Nokia Research Center, Locate Sensor is a prototype service designed to help ensure you never lose anything. You simply attach a physical wireless location tag (see photo gallery) to stuff such as your keys or wallet, and if you drop anything or it gets nicked from your pocket the accompanying Nokia Locate Sensor app points you in the direction of the item and even tells you how far away it is.
That’s not all it can do. Read on for the full details and to see a photo gallery of it in action.
The tiny Locate Sensor tag – the little green gizmo pictured below – can be attached and modified to be fixed to any sort of item you can think of, and the phone app will support up to 100 items. The battery powered tag runs for up to 18 months, but if the tag is made bigger it could accommodate a bigger battery and longer life, and similarly vice versa.
If you drop something the phone application is designed to automatically alert you and help you hone in on the object within a distance of up to 100 metres. It transmits a simple signal, and doesn’t use GPS, so it can be used inside and isn’t a battery killer.
Another smart use for Nokia Locate Sensor is that it can be tweaked to work the opposite way round – so if you have a tag on your person you can set it so that if your phone is lost or goes further that say 3 metres from you, it immediately disables the handset and re-enables it when it reenters your close vicinity.
It’s such a simple idea, the app works brilliantly, and it’s definitely one of the smartest little gadgets to make an appearance at CES 2009.
There’s no official word if Nokia Locate Sensor will leave Nokia Research Center and become a real product, but from what we saw of it we reckon it would make an awesome addition to Nokia’s product line-up. We’ll keep you posted.
TBC | £TBC | Nokia
This must be the gadget I’ve been waiting for my whole life! My mobile phone is the only thing I can find, simply because I can call it up and it starts making a noise. At last, someone’s realised what a really useful feature this is – come one Nokia, you have to start selling it! I’ll take 100 straight away!
I wonder it’s a RF ID application. How amazing the tag could be detected within 100 meters. I can way to see the inside of the tag.
I’d buy a Nokia to get this. I get so frustrated that I can neither Google or phone my car keys
Echoing the prev comments. I would immediately buy this. Great, the first 4 sold already.
I like this idea, imagine how much faster it would be to find your keys, or for that matter, your car!
Now if they can just come up with something to make it easier to find my marbles… that I would be willing to buy.
Aside from rfid, it may use the wifi or BlueTooth module to ‘triangulate’ and look for items. I want one now! 5 pcs sold already…
oh it may not be an rfid application…since the demo unit used, the N95 does not have an rfid function… and there does not seem to be any extra device attached to the N95. higher probability that it uses the built in wifi module or BlueTooth
I want one! Where can I buy it, is it still a prototype? I’ve been dreaming with a similar device for a long time!!! I keep lossing staff on the train and I’m fed up with it.
Thinking about it, this is not exactly what I was looking for. My idea was a chip that can be sticked into a mobile phone, car keys, wallet etc and have a small device attached to your watch or a wrist band for example. The wrings band should be wirelessly connected to the chips and should have a sound mechanism in a way that when your wrist band is separeted from the chips, it triggers a sound so that you can come back to the item lost and pick it up before is too late.
Why would I need that? Because I keep lossing items on the train on my way to work and I’m fed up with it!
Some one should create a credit card size tracking device to put in the wallet or make the tracking devices available for GPS
Shauna: That’s pretty much what Nokia Locate is – it’s tiny, really small. If you spread it out, I suspect it’d be as thin as a credit card… at least, one with RFID in, like an Oyster Card or a PayWave card.