Advances in mobile phone technology has been occurring rapidly, despite some of the best efforts of the carriers. After all, if it was up to them, we would all be paying $0.10 to send a 160 character SMS text message vs. downloading and watching YouTube videos for free. It does not pay to be a dumb pipe.

Sprint has been really difficult about opening their network to developers who want to build location-based services. In the recent past, they charged $5000 for access to their location SDKs. More recently, they have been working with third parties to give developers controlled access to the end customer’s location.

According to some informal testing run and reported by developers who attended last week’s Informal Android Developer Meetup, the Sprint-based Android smartphones are not providing location info from the carrier network. Fortunately, developers can still get the location info from the phone’s built-in GPS chipset. Given this alternative way to get location that is not dependent on the carrier, it is confusing as to why Sprint still has not opened their system more.

In related news, Sprint is adding more third party location providers to their network with its addition of technology from TechnoCom Corp. Just what developers need, more fragmentation.

This latest story just goes to show how far out of the loop I am. I had thought that the Apple SDK was already released and developers were programming away. But according to BrandWeek, the iPhone will not be opened up to regular third-party developers until June. I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for info on how the new apps are working on the iPhone.

Things are really getting interesting in wireless now.