(Reuters) - Nokia (NOK1V.HE) launched a service on Thursday which it said would cut the time a GPS-enabled cellphone takes to pinpoint its whereabouts, opening new opportunities for location-based online services.
Nokia hopes the service, available for users of its flagship N95 phones, will cut the startup time to one minute, from up to three minutes currently. The slowness has so far hampered takeup of cellphone navigation.
"It will be reliably under one minute in most countries," Ralph Eric Kunz, head of Nokia's navigation and mapping operations told Reuters in an interview.
Handset makers see GPS-based navigation as one of the next big value-adding offerings and even at this early stage.
Analysis firm Berg Insight has forecast annual shipments of handset-based personal navigation devices in Europe and the United States to reach 12 million units by 2009, compared with 1 million in 2005.
While most assisted-GPS technologies use mobile carriers cellsites to find locations faster, Nokia's new service bypasses operator networks, using data from SIM card and new software which helps the phone to catch satellite signals.
GPS chips use satellites orbiting the earth to determine the exact position of the user. They are found in car navigation systems, which have surged in popularity in recent years, and the technology is now making the jump to mobile phones.
source: Yahoo Technology News
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Topic: Nokia Presents Global Positioning Service (Read 648 times)