How many times have you arranged to meet someone and wondered where exactly it is? PinPoints is a great little app that takes the strain out of having to remember where it is. Does it work as prescribed?  Find out in our PinPoints review…

Hands up if this sounds familiar: You arrange to meet someone for lunch or for a drink after work. You pick a venue, then before you leave you pop onto the web to check how you to get there. Last thing before you leave, you print out a page from Google Maps and stick it in your pocket.

This is all well and good, but you have in your pocket a stupidly powerful bit of internet-aware GPS-enabled kit in the form of you Nokia smartphone. Why do you need to faff around getting a hard copy on *paper*?

Well, thanks to PinPoints, you may not need to any more. PinPoints is a combined mobile app and web service that makes sending directions to your mobile a one click process.

Sign up over at YourPinPoints and install the Nokia S60 app via direct SMS from the site or from another source – such as Ovi Store. As part of the signup process you will give PinPoints your mobile number, phone model and map application of choice (Nokia/Ovi Maps and Google Maps are the only options currently).

Now all you have to do is find out where you are going. You can search for a location directly from the YourPinPoints site using a Google Maps applet. This works just like regular Google Maps, but with an extra option on the pop-up ‘speech bubble’ that lets you send your currently selected location as a ‘Pinpoint’ to your phone.

A ‘Pinpoint’ turns out to be an SMS message containing a reference code. If PinPoints is running it will automatically open the SMS for you and read the contents, offering you the chance to accept the new landmark when you next open the app. If you aren’t running it, the message contains a text reminder to do so. Once PinPoints is aware of your new message it will let add it to the list of places it knows about and let you edit some metadata such as ‘name’ and ‘description’.

PinPoints can be sent to other users (a neat, viral way of spreading the app) or opened in either Nokia or Google Maps. You can request directions to each PinPoint from your current (GPS) location and all your PinPoints are searchable, should you accrue enough for that to be an issue.

Using the map browser on the PinPoints site is ok, but the best way to use the service – in our opinion – is by grabbing the free Firefox browser extension. With this in place (and assuming you use Firefox to browse the web, obviously) you can just highlight any address and right-click to send it directly to your phone. It’s a really nice touch that takes PinPoints from occasional curiosity to seriously useful.

The only slight niggle is to do with pricing. As we mentioned, the PinPoints app is a free download. To actually send a PinPoint, though, you are charged one ‘credit’. During the beta period, credits are free and you can just keep requesting more if you run out. At some point PinPoint credits will start to cost money, though there is no published pricing as yet. We would expect these credits to be fairly cheap, but not knowing does make up a little reluctant to start relying on the service.

The uncertainty about how much this will eventually cost prevents us from giving this full marks, but this is still a useful app with loads of potential. If PinPoints can judge the pricing right, we could see this being a must-have.

Details
Size: 0.068 MB
Price: Free
Download: PinPoints

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