report: GPS in consumer mobile phones rises to 50% by 2012

A recent report by Berg Insight says GPS-enabled handset shipments will reach 560 million units in 2012:

According to a new research report by Berg Insight, global shipments of GPS-enabled handsets is expected to grow from 175 million units in 2007 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.2 percent to reach 560 million units in 2012. Rapid adoption of GPS technology in mass-market GSM/WCDMA handsets will be the main driver. “Last year marked the breakthrough for GPS outside the CDMA-market with successful product launches by Nokia and others”, commented André Malm, telecom analyst, Berg Insight. “This year we expect to see an abundance of new models supporting GPS from all major brands. By 2009, GPS is going to be a must-have in all high-end handsets.” Berg Insight believes that the increasing penetration for GPS in GSM/WCDMA handsets will trigger a wave of innovations in the field of location-based services. “The availability of accurate position data in mobile devices creates exciting new opportunities for developers of local search, navigation and social networking applications”, said Mr Malm. “Nokia and Google will be two of the foremost players in this arena but there is a good chance that the development will also give birth to the next Facebook or MySpace.”

(source: berginsight.com (news dated 15/01/2008) via: ZDnet).

Of course, these kind of news items serve to underline the importance of the issues raises in The Mobile City. A whole range of questions arise when an increasing part of mobile phone users can acces locative services. For instance – as brought forward by Greenfield and Shepard in the first Situated Technologies pamphlet, p.13 – how does their sense of navigation change? What kind of new elements on ‘mental maps’ of the city emerge? And what does the shift of GPS use in car navigation to GPS use in handhelds (and thus pedestrian use) lead to?

Another issue, related to my earlier post about Pine’s “experience economy”, is the increasing commercialization of the city-scape by urban screens & information displays (big, public and mostly static screens), and through targeted location-based services on personal devices (small, private and mobile screens). Are we seeing a shift from urban screens to personal mobile devices? Are we going the Sao Paolo way?

An interesting remark in this small news item is the relation between GPS technology (global positioning system) and the kind of mobile network (either GSM or CDMA). In my recent fieldwork in Jakarta, Indonesia, I found that the market for cheap CDMA mobile telephony was rapidly rising, especially at the low end market (young people). The advantage is price, the disadvantage worse quality of service, and the fact that you are not as mobile with a CDMA phone as with GSM, because when you move for instance from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, you have to apply for a temporary new local number. CDMA technology itself is already ‘locative’ by nature, because it favors local use.

Also mentioned is the relation between locative media and new kinds of social networks. There are already several attempt to create social networking based on proximity: Jaiku (which was bought by Google), and Dutch examples Bliin.com, Trackr.nl. Or more targeted at a specific community, and perhaps therefore more successful, Geoskating.

Many architects have worked on this theme of how to build to facilitate (new) social communities. Sad to say they haven’t always been as successful as they wished… One of my favorites is Le Corbusier’s “Unité d’habitation” in Marseille, France. And I have spent a large part of my student life in Herzberger’s Weesperflat in Amsterdam. How can urban designers incorporate new technological developments like these in their professional practices? And how sceptical/optimistic must we be about reinstating utopia’s of community-building through designing spaces for social proximity?

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