Nokia's Kamppi Trial succeeds at indoor positioning, gets shelved anyway (video)

Sure, GPS can get you to the mall, but can it route you from the Bon Ton down to Penney's? Not so much. Indoor navigation is still generally a paper map reliant affair, something Nokia attempted to do away with at the Kamppi Shopping Center in Helsinki. The service, also called Kamppi, relied on wireless LAN to position people within the complex, meaning anyone with an S60 handset with WiFi could simply browse to kamppi.nokia.mobi, see their current position, locate their friends, and find their way around as shown after the break. 15,000 people tried it out successfully over the summer and so the service is receiving a fitting send-off: it's been "archived." Nokia is pledging to use the tech in future products, but we expect to be reliant on those giant, obelisk-mounted maps for many years to come.