Half of Nokia phones to have GPS in 2 years

SAN FRANCISCO: Nokia plans to add navigation to half of the phones it sells within a few years to find new revenue streams amid decreasing handset prices, a senior official at the world���s top cellphone maker said. Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia���s location-based activities, told Reuters he remains comfortable with Nokia���s year-old goal for seeing up to 50 percent of its phones equipped with global positioning system (GPS) chips in 2010 to 2012.���We are planning to ship 35 million GPS units this year,��� Halbherr said, adding ���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,��� he said. Last year Nokia sold 437 million phones, and it expects the volume to grow more than 10% this year. It sold 38 million phones in its multimedia range ���N Series��� and some 7 million ���E Series��� business phones.

GPS chips use orbiting satellites to pinpoint the whereabouts of a phone user, thereby enabling a host of location-based services. SiRF Technology Holdings is the world���s largest maker of GPS chips. Last October, when unveiling an $8.1 billion offer for the US-based digital map supplier Navteq, Nokia said it would have tens of navigation-enabled phones on the market by end-2008.

It sells five models with built-in GPS and has unveiled four more which will ship in the coming months. Halbherr said his company���s GPS phone strategy goes far beyond the phones themselves. It���s part of a comprehensive strategy to make location-enabled, context-aware phones available across its product line, he said.

Beyond phones specially equipped with location-finding technology, all Nokia phones stand to benefit as GPS phone users move about and effectively update Nokia Maps in real time for other phone users.���Location will ultimately be in every device,��� Halbherr declared, not just the half of phones with special GPS chips.

In addition to GPS chips, Nokia���s strategy involves pushing Wi-Fi enabled devices that use local wireless network antennas to achieve more or less the same location-awareness in these devices. Even phones without GPS or Wi-Fi can use local cellphone towers to identify their position on maps, he noted.

Nokia Maps, first introduced in early 2006, will come out with a version 2.0 for phones worldwide later this month. Halbherr mocks the current rush by internet companies such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to deliver all their services as centralised, web-based services over the network, rather than using the growing powers of the device in users��� hands. ���I believe memory and computation speed will grow faster than bandwidth,��� he said. ���I am not a believer in cloud computing.���

���All the American navigation solutions are basically server based, which overloads the network and degrades the consumer experience,��� Halbherr said referring to both internet map services and companies specialising in car navigation.