>Please do not forget who the original poster was and his questions: He
>asked:
>"can I display my own LAT/LON values somehow without a map application ?"

For some cell phone implementation of "GPS" (this one doesn't involve
actual satellites talking to your phone), your position coordinates
are present at the cell towers and somewhere in the offices of Big
Brother, but not on your cell phone. If a map application can get
your position at all, it has to ask your cell provider to send it,
and that may cost money.

>The answer to that is "yes" and it is proven by the amount of freeware
>available for PPC/phones that turn GPS data into lat/long.

Some phones (and PDAs) have a real GPS that listens to satellites
built in. I suspect that includes a Nextel phone I was testing a
few years ago: it never managed to talk to the satellites because
of one of (a) office building roof, (b) parking garage roof, or (c)
car roof was in the way most of the time, and the coordinates didn't
update for several days. That phone permitted me to display the
coordinates on the screen, along with some info about how many
satellites were visible. This seems to be what the OP is looking
for. I doubt that particular phone model is still sold, but
user-visible GPS is still likely available on some phones.

On my current phone (Motorola RAZR V3 with T-Mobile), I don't think
the feature is available. This phone doesn't have a lot of memory
for apps or maps, either (about 3 meg).

The standard communication protocol for GPS information is NMEA
0183. It specifies a record format, which might not be used in,
say, a Java application running ON the phone (there is more likely
to be a Java call like GetMyGPSCoords() which returns lat/long,
altitude, and time, and maybe speed and compass heading and some
indication whether it's a good fix. If, internally, there is a GPS
chip delivering a NMEA 0183 data stream, it may be available in a
friendlier format), and the data contained in individual fields,
which among other things includes lat/long in degrees, minutes, and
fractions of minutes.

"Conversion" to lat/long is unlikely to be much of an issue, since
that's how it's delivered, unless you like your lat/long as degrees
and fractions of degrees, or degrees, minutes, seconds, and fractions
of seconds, and in this case, it's fairly simple and straightforward
math.

>The original poster also stated:
>"I just want to be able to log specific GPS coords
>to be used later by standard GPS units."
>
>It sounded like he was interested in "geocaching." That is basically just a
>way to say where something is via long/lat and there are all sorts of sites
>about "geocaching" on the internet.

It can also be useful for letting a tow truck find you when your
car is broken down at night along a highway with few visible
landmarks, or trying to get the whole family back together at an
amusement park. But yes, I'll agree with an interpretation that
the OP was interested in geocaching.

>FYI I'm not really interested in taking up a debate about secondary
>questions on this thread that doesn't answer the original poster since I too
>am looking for the same thing the original poster is.