Nokia boosts mobile GPS speed

Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia Corporation has this week launched a brand new service designed specifically to boost the performance of its GPS-equipped mobile phone handsets by reducing the processing time required in order to locate precision positioning. Espoo-based Nokia Corp., which is the world’s leading power in mobile phone production, claims that its newly introduced GPS service will reduce restrictive startup times by about two-thirds, cutting the time from as high as three minutes down to a minute. "It will be reliably under one minute in most countries," outlined Ralph Eric Kunz, head of Nokia's navigation and mapping operations, in a related Reuters interview. The time reduction could well prove to be significant seeing as lengthy location times on handset devices have been blamed for the current sluggish rate of consumer adoption.If Nokia’s new service does usher in significantly improved performance while bolstering consumer interest, it will certainly reinforce industry expectation for GPS-ready handsets. Many handset manufacturers believe that GPS navigation tools can offer considerable value to the market, and telecom analyst Berg Insight suggests that shipments of handset-based GPS devices in the US and Europe will hit 12 million over the next two years. Shipments stood at a mere 1 million units as recently as 2005.In terms of performance application, Nokia’s new GPS service will sidestep the more traditional location-finding cellsites utilised by the majority of mobile operators, instead relying on new software and SIM card data to assist the handset in swiftly securing signals emanating from satellites. While the new speedy service will be made available only on Nokia’s line of GPS-enabled phones, the company has intonated that it eventually aims to better filter GPS chip technology down through its production portfolio to cover a more wide-ranging selection of its handsets.