TAG | Nokia showcases new GPS equipped cell phones |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Monday, 19 February 2007 | |
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That’s because GPS has become very popular over the past couple of years, with numerous new models from today’s category leaders including Navman, TomTom, Road Angel, Mio and others at ever lower prices, making almost effortless in-car navigation affordable for just about anyone. Now that the technology is to be subsumed into the mobile phone, which is already a phone, clock with alarm, calculator, organizer, mp3 player, camera, video camera, photo album, currency converter, weights and measures converter, games player, web browser, email device, text messaging device and plenty more, with most ‘smartphone’ models offering hundreds of paid and free programs to download from the Internet to further expand the capabilities of your phone, turn-by-turn GPS mapping is a natural fit for a device that you likely already carry with you everywhere. Able to connect to satellites in what should be less than a minute, with the ability to get extra position information from phone towers, Nokia’s new 6110 slider with GPS mapping, and super N95 smartphone with GPS map, 5 megapixel Carl-Zeiss autofocus camera with flash, video camera with DVD-like 640x480 resolution, mp3 player with 1Gb MicroSD included in the box and plenty more are set to shake up the competition and ensure Nokia retains its leadership position in the global mobile phone market – with the N95 their most advanced ‘do-it-all in style’ smartphone yet. Nokia's N95 should launch next month, with the 6110 due mid-year. Nokia also announced that the N330 standalone GPS unit, similar to existing in-car GPS maps on sale in stores worldwide, will now be available in Australia within the next month or so, after initially saying there were no plans to launch the N330 locally after it was unveiled to the world late last year. As Nokia also have a Bluetooth wireless GPS module which connects to other phones, Nokia now believe they have a very strong line-up in the mobile phone and GPS space, in a market which is predicted to continue enjoying strong growth over the next few years. Nokia’s phones are also able to handle things such as live traffic updates, but this capability relies upon local partners who are able to offer the service which mobile phones can pick up through data updates – with none offering the capability as yet in Australia. As Nokia already claim to sell more digital cameras and mp3 players than any other company by virtue of the fact they are built into the many hundreds of millions of phones sold each year, Nokia will soon be able to legitimately claim a strong share of the GPS market. After all, with 140 million phones shipped last year containing a digital camera, and 40 million phones with mp3 playback capabilities (with some cross over between those two figures), Nokia’s GPS equipped line will only expand as future models come with GPS as standard. In Australia, Nokia expects existing distributors and independent retailers to bring their latest range of phones to Australian consumers, including an upcoming Motorola RAZR clone with 3G, video calling and Nokia’s popular Series 60 interface. A new ‘Communicator E95’ will also launch as a slimline ‘mini-notebook’ that also runs on the Series 60 interface, offering high-speed downloads, full web/email/messaging/multimedia capabilities and full access to a large library of Series 60 programs already on the market.
2007 is shaping up to be a big year in phones as all the major manufacturers release highly advanced models with ever better features while remaining an evolution of already popular and well known interfaces, and for the most part, easy to use – a crucial factor in face of upcoming competition from Apple and their iPhone.
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