How will the GPS phone market evolve in the next 3 years ?
The two principal functions of mobile phones have been picture taking and music playing. Today the satellite navigation is expected to be the must-have feature: research suggests that 25% of mobile phones will have GPS by 2010.
In the United States, a large number of mobile phones have integrated GPS chips for security reasons, to pinpoint user's location when they are in danger. But theses chips can also be the support of various location based services. Nokia and Motorola have already introduced their navigation enabled handset for the mass market, so far the sells going well : apparently PNDs don't have a negative impact on GPS enabled phones growth rate (we have talked about it here) and we expect that growth to continue in the next years.
The most obvious service of GPS enabled phones is turn-by-turn navigation, which provides directions simply by allowing users to type a destination.Satellites locate the GPS-enabled device and map the device's location to the destination.A map can be then generated on the user's screen, along with text based directions. So the key factor for GPS phones is to keep the map up to date : See #8-Why did Nokia buy Navteq :-)
But location based services of mobile phones will soon go far beyond navigation :
Mobile search will become a standard feature on all handsets over the next three years.
Mobile Social Networking will be a killer application (social networking : "finding friends and meeting new ones", receiving alerts when a friend is close by, ect)
Geotagging: Internet and maps will allow people to upload pictures, videos and sound clips recorded with their phones that are automatically encoded with the location where the picture was taken or the recording was made
Mobile Geo-advertising : according Telephia's report, mobile video revenues in Q1 2007 increased 198% over the previous year, and mobile video users had the best ad recall of any mobile data user group. With LBS, mobile ads will be adopted on a large scale.
23 November 2007 in The business of GPS Permalink