GPS-enablement will prove resilient in 2009

New data from the Nielsen Company and ABI Research suggest that GPS-enabled handsets will weather the downturn well. Adoption will be driven by advanced chipsets, niche industry applications and, on the consumer side, a young demographic enamoured with location-based services. “GPS enablement is spreading across smartphones – there is good penetration now, at less than 50% but climbing,” George Perros, ABI’s senior analyst for location based services, tells Report on Wireless. “In the next five years we expect this to rise into the 90% range.” While ABI believes that global handset shipments will drop by 4% to 5% in 2009, GPS-enabled phones will climb to 240 million units, an increase of 6.4% over 2008. Growth will be driven by demand for feature-rich smartphones such as Apple Corp.’s iPhone 3G, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, and Nokia’s Nseries. With Nokia throwing its weight behind added handset functionality after a disappointing year, there should be increased demand on the chip side with GPS chipsets penetrating the market to a much greater degree. ABI estimates that nine of every 10 smartphones will contain GPS integrated chips in 2014, compared with one in three in 2008. For its part, Nielsen surveyed over 50,000 consumers in the United States and Europe, and found they intend to dramatically increase use of mobile data services over the next two years, with GPS being an important part of the story. “Given that primary mobile use is based on convenience, GPS and location-based services are more resilient during a slowdown,” says Jeff Herrmann, Nielsen’s VP of mobile media. “This is carrier-driven, with pricing being the number one factor.” The Nielsen data showed that GPS-LBS penetration was stronger in the US than in Europe, at 9% versus 5%. As well, the US data indicated that 42% of respondents expected to increase their use in the next 12 months, which was higher than EU expectations. But it is the demographic results that are the most compelling. “We are significantly over the index in the 18-34 demographic,” says Herrmann. “But at age 45 it falls of a cliff – consumer GPS-LBS is being driven primarily by 18-34 year olds.” To make this happen for both consumers and industry, the handsets have to be enabled with the right chipsets. At last month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Broadcom Corp. pushed an extension of its combo chip line-up with a device integrating its GPS location-based IP, Bluetooth and FM radio; Qualcomm Inc. launched the Mobile Station Modem MSM7227 chipset designed to enable high-performance, sub-$150 smartphones; and Skyhook Wireless joined with Texas Instruments (TI) to integrate Skyhook's hybrid positioning system into TI's mobile connectivity solutions. But they may have been out-matched by CSR plc’s R9000 hybrid positioning capabilities. “Hybrid positioning schemes are at the absolute core of CSR's positioning technologies – this is what CSR's eGPS technology is all about,” says Raj Gawera, VP marketing at CSR’s handset business unit. “eGPS augments traditional GPS or assisted GPS (A-GPS), using fine-time aiding and cellular augmentation.” Gawera says that while satellite and cellular information are the two main sources of positioning information, CSR's vision for its eGPS hybrid system is to incorporate many technologies. “eGPS can potentially be augmented further using Wi-Fi, UWB, even Bluetooth,” he says. In Canada, developments by companies such as CSR, which is working to produce a wide variety of specialized LBS solutions, will likely benefit companies such as Ottawa’s Guardian Mobility Co., which offers solutions to locate and monitor aircraft, people and assets. “About a year ago we launched an initiative called RimRocked – it’s a consumer-oriented GPS that combines blogging and photography sharing,” says Amit Nandi, the director of product management for Guardian. “It was novel in that it was one of the first Web 2.0 applications that integrated GPS-LBS.” For Nandi and Guardian, new device-based capabilities are going to help define what people are able to do in the future. “The new iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and Storm, these are really mini computers,” he says. “They are Trojan horses.” But Nandi also argues that cloud computing may make device-centric capabilities less relevant. “At the end of the day it won’t matter what your phone can and can’t do,” he says. “The network itself will contain the computing resources, and the smart-phone or terminal will access the resources in the cloud.” Nandi says that Apple has been successful because it has thought hard on how to get applications to the device, an area where RIM is having to pay catch-up. And then there is Google Inc.’s Android. “Being an open system, Android will probably encourage the rapid development of innovative GPS-LBS solutions,” says Gawera from CSR. “We have been demonstrating our GPS technologies on Android to show how even a resource-limited phone running Android can easily handle its GPS processing with a small 200 MHz processor.”

GPS-enablement will prove resilient in 2009

News | 02/24/2009 5:24 pm EST

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