This may have been obvious from the amount of location-aware apps that have been gushing out of Nokia Beta Labs lately, but Nokia have decided that GPS is where it’s at (and they have the coordinates to prove it). Accordingly, by 2012 over 50% of its handsets will have GPS receivers built in.
Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s head of location-based activities, said in an interview with Reuters that “We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year and many more location-enabled phones that use cell-towers to orient themselves on the map. You will see few ‘E’ or ‘N’ Series phones without GPS.”
So, does this mean that in the next couple of years Nokia expects GPS to be cheap enough to stuff into lower-end handsets, or are they just being optimistic about their smartphones taking off in the mass market? Given that they are also putting a lot of development time and money into low-end ‘third world’ phones, it would seem to be the latter. Great news, unless they expect us all to pay smartphone prices.
“Nokia expects GPS to be cheap enough to stuff into lower-end handsets”
Just the high-end and many mid-range phones.