The golden days of automatic cell phone location cloaking are about to end. GPS and other "location awareness" technologies are being built in to new mobile phones. And soon they will be able to track your whereabouts — or, at least, the whereabouts of your phone.

No wireless internet offering has gotten more recent hype than one that allows your cell phone to pinpoint the nearest restaurant, police station, friend or relative. "Location awareness" has been labeled the next killer app by industry watchers, and it's here now. Japan pioneered the technology in the mid-1990s, European operators including Vodafone introduced it in 1999 and Americans followed in the last two years. No nation is farther along than South Korea, where SK Telecom uses the technology to call customers strolling by its Seoul airport lounge, inviting them inside. This beckoning from out of the blue evokes the intimate "awareness" of the wireless networks depicted in "The Matrix."

Smart antennas are fully integrated GPS solutions that combine GPS electronics with an antenna in a single package. They can be plugged into the serial port of a personal computer or personal digital assistant.

"Because they are self-contained, smart antennas can instantly bring location awareness to a PC or PDA," said Turetzky. "When you add mapping software, you bring complete navigation capabilities to these platforms."