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"I'm NOT on the train!" - Nokia GPS is for car owners...

It was my obsession with cameras that led me to borrow a Nokia N82 phone for my trip to Barcelona last week. Nobody told me it had a GPS receiver built in, tied to Nokia Maps - so I was astonished, on the train from Gatwick, to find myself being tracked. We were on the train.

A little experiment showed me how to zoom in and out, and I was fascinated to see how quickly it locked onto the signal. We were on the train. I rang a friend, to tell him. "I'm on the train," I told him, "and the GPS is showing where we are!"

Not having the manual with me, I was not exactly expert, but one thing I was clear about, was that we were on the train. And it dawned on me that nobody would argue about this fact - except, perhaps, the Nokia N82 phone.

The little cross-hair showed the position of the phone - well, as long as we had a signal, anyway. But you couldn't help noticing that, though we were on the train, the cross-hairs weren't.

The map showed the train line all right - no problem there (well, apart from the need to download new maps every few minutes) but it rapidly became apparent that the cross-hairs were on the road. The road next to the train, sure, but not on the train. Oh, no.

As the train moved nearer and nearer to London, the little arrow jumped from the rail track (shown) to the nearest road whenever it could. If we had roads on either side of the track, it would alternate between the two roads, and refuse to associate itself with the train.

"I'm NOT on the train!" it kept shouting... "I am NOT the sort of phone who might belong to someone who Does Not Drive!"