The smartphone's chief competitors offer real satellite navigation systems, users love the feature, and it could be a moneymaker for AppleIf there's anything the iPhone has lacked compared with other phones in its class, it has been high-speed connectivity and the ability to determine its location accurately. Apple (AAPL) will address the first shortcoming in a matter of days, when it unveils the second version of the year-old iPhone on June 9.
I'm hoping Apple also tackles No. 2—by including support for Global Positioning System navigation. For one thing, most of the handsets in the iPhone's peer group contain GPS chips by default. Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry devices have included GPS support for a few years now, while Finland's Nokia (NOK) considers GPS so strategically important that last year it spent $8.1 billion to acquire Chicago's Navteq (NVT) (BusinessWeek.com, 11/12/07), a digital mapmaker that supplies all the major navigation device companies.
What's more, navigation applications can make a lot of money for carriers, and by extension, Apple, which splits service revenue with AT&T (T), its partner in the U.S. A survey last year by Nielsen Mobile found that navigation applications were second only to games as the most popular downloadable wireless application. Companies like TeleNav and Networks In Motion have deals to supply their software and services to all the major carriers. The potential market is huge: iSuppli pegged the number of navigation-ready handsets sold last year at north of 160 million units, more than seven times the number of standalone navigation devices sold.
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