Standing at a Tube station with an A to Z, baffled as to which street to walk down, may soon be a thing of the past thanks to a technology which lets you orientate yourself in relation to your surrounds using your phone.

Nokia has unveiled the world's first phone with a built-in compass, which will mean that owners can not only find out where they are but also gauge which direction they should walk in by lining up satellite images on their phone with the objects they see around them.

The 'compass phone' - or Navigator, as it is called - works by aligning maps that already exist within the handset according to magnetic north - much as a compass needle would. The owner can then look at the buildings around him or her, line them up with the satellite imagery that is generated by the phone's GPS system, and work out which way to walk.

Having a compass in a phone with GPS also opens up the possibility that a person should not in theory be able to be lost no matter where they are on the earth's surface, because the phone should always be able to point them in the direction of the nearest town.

Although GPS systems have for several years assisted with navigation, they typically depend on movement in order to assess which way a car, for instance, should turn. Combining this technology with a compass, however, should in theory enable a device to tell a person which way to go from a standing start.

The Navigator, which will be released in Europe in July, was just one of a number of phones Nokia was displaying at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco dedicated to 'location-based services', or technologies which take advantage of knowing where a phone is or where it has been in order to provide information to its owner.

Using a GPS-enabled phone, people can now, for instance, get directions to a nearby restaurant of their choice, first by choosing a cuisine - Italian, say, and then having the phone trawl through the addresses of all Italian restaurants on the web to discover which are nearby. The restaurants are listed by proximity, and the person can be guided to them by the phone's GPS system.

Other applications of 'geo-tracking' include allowing a jogger to see more information about a run they've done - how far they've gone (and the route they took), how high they climbed, how fast they travelled at different periods, or how many steps they took - all by processing the data gathered by a phone's GPS sensors.

GPS-based information can also be attached to photographs, so a tourist, for instance, can see on a map the precise location of where they took each of their pictures.

There will also be scope to link other web-based information - such as Wikipedia entries - to maps, so that as a tourist travels in an open top bus through London, more information about the objects they are passing could be offered to them.

"You can essentially become an expert on everywhere," Michael Halbherr, head of location-based services as Nokia, said. "One click and you know where you are. Suddenly location becomes a hugely important lens through which to see the world."

Nokia has already compiled maps of more than 170 countries, and for upwards of £59.99 per year, owners of GPS-enabled handsets can get 'live navigation' services delivered straight to their phone, rather than needing a Tom Tom or other standalone GPS device.

The company, which makes two fifths of phones sold in the world, has said it will ship 35 million GPS-enabled handsets this year.

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