More Than 550 Million Gps-enabled Handsets Will Ship by 2012

In the wake of personal navigation devices'devices."
success, cellular carriers have started to offerHowever, as GPS begins to penetrate lower-end
on-board and off-board navigation solutions, asphones, the cost, power consumption, and
well as a range of LBS (Location Based Services)footprint of GPS chipsets will have to be further
such as friend finder and local search on GPSreduced. This will be made possible by single
handsets.chipset technology and the emergence in 2009 of
Community and social-networking-relatedcombination chips integrating GPS, Bluetooth, and
functionality, such as the sharing of POIs (PointsWi-Fi all on one die.
of Interest) and geo-tagged pictures, is alsoMajor silicon vendors such as Broadcom, NXP, and
becoming popular and is expected to boostAtheros are well positioned to develop such
GPS-enabled handset uptake as carriers, handsetssolutions following the acquisition of GPS chipset
manufacturers, and service providers look tovendors Global Locate, GloNav, and u-Nav,
capitalize on the LBS trend.respectively.
"While most CDMA handsets are alreadyAt the same time, the thorny issue of indoor GPS
GPS-enabled and GPS is set to become acoverage has to be addressed, since
standard feature in GSM smartphones, GSMhandset-based LBS services are frequently used
feature phones are next on the agenda to bein challenging environments with reduced GPS
equipped with GPS technology," says ABIsignal strength. Network-assisted A-GPS and
Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte.high-sensitivity GPS-receivers are becoming key
"GPS chipset vendors increasingly target handsets,requirements to reduce the time necessary to
looking for new markets and spurred on by theacquire fixes and to improve location accuracy.
recent dramatic growth of personal navigation