A decade of GPS

One of the possible destinations we have in mind for our 25th Anniversary Holiday next year, is Japan. Even though the Japanese couple in Burgundy couldn’t understand why we’d bother, we are undeterred! Though, to be fair, Japan is one of a few options at the moment so it’s certainly not definite. Anyway, to aid in our choosing, we’ve been looking into Japanese touristy things and, naturally for us, the Rough Guide that we bought a while ago.

I was reading the Rough Guide section called “Basics” last night when I came across a sentence that had me quickly flicking the pages back to the start to find out the publishing date.

The section I was reading was about how difficult it was/is to find physical addresses in Japan because, while the nomenclature is quirky, the actual buildings and streets are not easily found. The piece goes on:

The Rough Guide was published in 2005. This means that the complete acceptance that GPS capabilities are on our phones has been around for less than ten years. This doesn’t seem long enough. I feel I’ve been using Google Maps on my phone for a much longer time than that.

Looking a bit deeper, I discovered that the very first iPhone (whereby most of us discovered the joys of mobile maps), was released in 2007! That’s only eight years ago. And yet they are so much a part of everyone’s life now that we’d be lost without them.

Also, as if the Rough Guide editors had some sort of link into Apple boss, Steve Jobs’ head, development of the first iPhone was begun in 2005. All very coincidental…maybe.

Incidentally, it rained for half the day today though we did manage to get a walk in before the drenching started. Not so lucky was young Master Crazy who started his walk with their dogs just as we returned home from ours. Here’s another video.