By Reuters
Published: July 19, 2007, 4:53 AM PDT
Nokia launched on Thursday a service that it said will cut the time a GPS-enabled cell phone takes to pinpoint its whereabouts, opening new opportunities for location-based online services.
Nokia hopes the service, available for people who own its flagship N95 smart phones, will cut the start-up time to one minute, from up to three minutes currently. The slowness has so far hampered interest in cell phone navigation.
"It will be reliably under one minute in most countries," said Ralph Eric Kunz, head of Nokia's navigation and mapping operations.
Handset makers see GPS (Global Positioning System) as one of the next big "value-adds."
Analysis firm Berg Insight has forecast annual shipments of handset-based personal navigation devices in Europe and the United States to reach 12 million units by 2009, compared with 1 million in 2005.
While most assisted-GPS technologies use mobile carriers cell sites to find locations faster, Nokia's new service bypasses operator networks, using data from a SIM card and new software that helps the phone to catch satellite signals.
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