Nokia Sells a Whole Lotta Phones, Soon a Whole Lotta GPS

Well in case you weren’t already aware, Nokia is quite bullish on LBS these days. A new article out today has Nokia saying that half of the phones it sells will have navigation built in by the 2010 and 2012 timeframe. The company will sell nearly ½ billion phones in 2008 according to estimates and expects 35 million of those to come equipped with GPS (7% of current phone sales). “You will see few N or E series phones without GPS” according to Michael Halbherr, the head of LBS at Nokia. The N series sold 38 million phones and E Series sold 7 million phones last year. The company also expects all phones to have some level of coarse location awareness through either wi-fi or cell tower positioning schemes soon. As you might expect, Nokia seems to see the handset as the center of the LBS universe with storage and processing speed on the handset allowing the phone to provide much of the necessary capabilities for LBS directly rather than being heavily dependent on the phones wireless data connection to off load work to the network, which “overloads the network and degrades the consumer experience” according to Halbherr.

Hmm to throw a GPS chip in 250 million phones at $4 per chip would set them back $1 billion a year, looks like they could just buy the leading GPS manufacturer, SIRF, outright for less than half of that right now!
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