We are happy to release a preview of our upcoming product the "Freedom Personal Safety".

The full product will be released within the next 2 months however we would love any feedback from the BB community here about the system and what you would like to see in it. There are also a number of closed beta spaces available for the BlackBerry application testing (PM me if interested).

In short the system combines your BlackBerry, a small application and a special bluetooth GPS receiver to give you 24/7 GPS tracking capabilities and to act as an emergency button to instantly alert friends, colleagues or family if you get in trouble (one push of the button on the GPS unit will send an SMS message to your pre-selected contacts with a message and a link to a map of your location).

You can set it up to allow people to send you a specially worded SMS message, such as "FPS:WhereRU" and and automatically get back a message with your current location on it (perfect for checking where your kids are when they are late home from school or checking the location of your field workers).

The GPS receiver which is part of the Personal Safety is similar in appearance to our Freedom Keychain GPS 200 unit but in addition to the "alert button" it is using th elatest 66 channel MTK chipset (so is even more powerful than the GPS 2000). It can also be used as a regular GPS receiver for mobile mapping.

For more information and to see the unit in action please visit:
Freedom Personal Safety demo

Wirelessly posted (White and Nerdy)

Its a neat looking app.

One thing to look into, is to have the app detect if there is an onboard GPS and use that if u can.

This is a good app tho. I would imagine it will be used a lot by some people

You will have the option to use the internal GPS as well if you want. However the GPS in the receiver is better then the GPS in any of the BlackBerry's so we would suggest using that instead (more accurate and more likely to get a GPS lock in places where the internal GPS wouldn't work).

We are planning to release a "software only" version of this in the future but then you have physically pick up your phone, then unlock it, then either run the app or press a convenience key to trigger the alert (not much good if you have fallen over and broken your arm or your being attacked). For working in the other direction though (i.e to be able to check where your kids are) the software only option could be perfect.

Great utility widget! keep me informed when becomes available.

looking forward...