I have the G1 now for a week. It is a good phone which is still very new. This means that it doesn’t have the 10.000 apps like the iphone. Yet it already does some amazing things apart from seamless Gmail, Google Calander & Talk integration. The application that I keep going back to is Wikitude.
Wikitude is projects wikipedia location data on your screen on the camera input. You hold the camera level in front of you and see the world through its lens. Wikitude projects wiki data over it. As you turn the phone around you see the different points of interested projected in the screen. It a simple idea but very powerful. Here is the developer demoing their product:
My next tourist guide is in my phone. When I arrive I just hold my phone up and see what’s up, superimposed on the camera image.
It a good start. Its in the same category as Point and Find from Nokia. Here is Scobeizer checking it out. Point and Find works with image recognition instead of looking up data based on a GPS position like Wikitude. Point and Find is a QR-code like application. It scans an image and the get an action from it. Yet it can ’scan’ any image, even your house, and then go to your private website.
Both are examples of combining the real world with the virtual world. It will make the webbrowser based internet look very old.