Nokia’s Latest Little Gizmo: The Locate Sensor

At CES (the worlds largest consumer electronics tradeshow) 2009 which took place on Jan 12th, Nokia announced a new project cooked up by the Nokia Research Centre, the ‘Nokia Locate Sensor’. A prototype service designed to help ensure you never lose anything. You simply attach a physical wireless location tag (the little green gizmo pictured to the right) 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 application on yourphone points you in the direction of the item and even tells you how far away it is.

The tiny Locate Sensor tag can be attached and modified to be fixed to any sort of item you can think of and because of its size it can go pretty much unnoticed. The phone application itself will support up to 100 items so you would never be able to use the excuse “sorry I’m late, I couldn’t find my….” ever again.

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. So, how does it work? Well, It transmits a simple signal and doesn’t use GPS to locate the misplaced items we know that much, so it can be used inside and isn’t a battery killer. The actual technology Nokia use is still not mentioned but if we had to guess we’d have to bank on Bluetooth.

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 than say 3 metres away from you, it immediately disables the handset and re-enables it when it re-enters your selected vicinity.

Nokia say it can operate flawlessly up to 18 months before you need to recharge it, but if the tag is made bigger it could theoretically accommodate a bigger battery and longer life. It’s such a simple idea, and innovative to the mobile market. The application looks as if it works brilliantly, if we can believe the news coming out of the tradeshow. It’s definitely the smartest little gadget to make an appearance so far this year… that’s probably not giving it enough credit, as we haven’t even made it to February, however I think you get the point… it’s a great little device to start the year with.