When I first saw the headline on this blog posting: "SkyMap for Android", my immediate reaction was that Google had created the computer that took over the World in the Terminator movies. However, it turns out that that was Skynet, so I guess we're safe for now. (Google will do it one day! Just wait and see!)
SkyMap on Android measures the location of the phone using GPS and also senses its orientation in 3-dimensions using a magnetometer and accelerometer. Based on the direction the phone is pointing it then shows a map of the sky, showing the stars that you are looking at. This is pretty cool, but will it inspire a new generation of budding astronomers? Probably not ... it's another cool toy for us to play with for a while until we get bored and move on to the next one.
This application, however, points the way to a greater potential. The nice thing about the stars is that they don't change very rapidly, so you can download the entire database in a few kB and keep it on your Android phone. With a more sophisticated application, data could be streaming from the network to tell you about everything you point your phone at ... tourist information, advertising, social networking information, etc., etc.
A company that realized this a few years ago is Geovector <link> who's promise is to allow you to "Click on the Real World" ... using your phone as the pointing device. The concept is mind-blowing, but I can see that (until Air came along!) the location technology has some catching-up to do, which probably explains Geovector's slow adoption curve.