Sprint, Microsoft roll out location-based Live Search

It looks like Sprint users now have a few more search options at their disposal, with the carrier and Microsoft announcing today that Live Search will now automatically take the users' location into consideration. Apparently, the service makes use of cell-tower triangulation, and not GPS, to determine the users location, making it somewhat less accurate but far more widely available. What's more, the pair also announced a new voice search feature that'll work with five of Sprint's high end phones, including the Samsung a900 and a920, the Motorola Razr, the Sanyo 840 and the LG 550. As you can probably guess, it will let you speak search terms instead of typing them in, with it also giving you the option to press a button to call the business you're searching for. While Sprint is getting all Microsoft's attention at the moment, the company is quick to point out that the service is not exclusive, and "could become available via other operators in the future."

[Image courtesy of Search Engine Land]

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 18th 2007 10:27PM]

for those of you frantically searching for this app like i was and finding the previous comments posted here to be mostly useless... here is how you ACTUALLY get it:

youre expected to go to the sprint vision portal, and search for something. this brings you to a page of local results, with a link for "Precise GPS Location". Click that and you'll be taken to the sprint premium content store to download this program for $0.00.

or you can use this link to get to it directly:
http://search.portal.sprintpcs.com/wls.aspx

you could also use http://messaging.sprintpcs.com to txt msg the link to yourself...

hope that helps someone!

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 20th 2007 3:00PM]

This absolutely does not work. Well - for some of us, anyway.

There are two kinds of phone out there:
- Those non-PDA phones that have Net access. These are proprietary browsers that really act more like terminals. These probably all work, and these are what they are referring to when they say, "Just select the Web app and Search!"
- Folks like me with a Sprint 6700. This has WM5 as a full-fledged (lets not argue that point here) operating system. it has a free-standing browser. It also has the ability to download and run applications built for WM5. THESE are the ones not working. The link provided a few up really takes you to: http://manage.sprintpcs.com/redirect?product=PCS594370 and THIS link times out. I would be very interested in seeing if anyone with an actual PDA phone has this working. If so, how.

This has to to be one of the worst roll-outs I've ever seen. I mean, please, if you can't event get the LINK working.....

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 19th 2007 11:29AM]

Maybe the link is blocking anything but the http host string listed by the browsers that sprint listed. From what I can tell there are two components of this. Theres a search portal somewhere (windows live based) that these phones can access, and if they search for a term, then they get gps relevant results. I can only assume that this is done by sprint examining requests to this service and then doing an A-GPS lookup of your phone's location through their towers, and then tacking that onto the request sent to microsoft. This approach wouldnt require any software to download, as some people are describing. Also there is this app that is probably some Java-flavored port of windows live client for PPC that also supports this functionality. This is what is linked from that search portal.

But neither the search portal, which I can only assume is this search.portal.sprint.com thing, nor this link to download the program work if you navigate to them from a pocket pc. And I can only assume this is because they are denying any host string that identifies the phone as not being one of the phones they list as supported. So, that being said, seeing as how browsers are available for ppc that can spoof a specific host string, does anyone know what host string the browsers on these supported phones present?

[(Unverified) Posted Sep 19th 2007 12:12PM]

Well, a couple comments to this:
- While they may be blocking, as you say, it would be an amazingly stupid approach. Just navigate to a pretty page that says "sorry, aint gonna work for your phone." Sure would keep folks from getting pissy.
- You cannot get there from a PC either, making me think even more that this is just a screw-up.
- All of the press releases that I've seen speak to cell-tower-triangulation, not GPS.