GPS phones set to drop in price

Chipset manufacturers are developing solutions that will permit the integration of GPS in mobile phones at lower costs, with significant improvements in accuracy, time-to-first-fix, and reception in indoor environments. As a consequence, the wholesale ASP (Average Selling Price) of GPS-enabled handsets will fall below US$200 by 2010, according to analysts at ABI Research.

“Recent industry developments, such as the announcement by CSR and Samsung of lower costs for GPS modules for mobile devices, will ensure that prices for GPS-enabled handsets quickly come down,” says ABI Research analyst Shailendra Pandey. “It will become more cost-effective for manufacturers to have GPS in a large proportion of devices, rather than offering it in fewer handsets; this will enable lower ASPs for devices as well.”

At present most handsets with integrated GPS are smartphones or high-end feature phones, with wholesale prices in the range of US$250 to US$500 and GPS chipset solutions for handsets have been costly (US$5 to US$10 per handset). However, GPS chipset vendors, such as CSR and SiRF, have developed solutions that will bring down the cost of integrating GPS in handsets to under US$2. Other vendors, including Broadcom, plan to integrate GPS with Bluetooth on a single-chip. Current GPS-enabled handsets typically are CDMA devices, but these solutions will also allow the integration of GPS in GSM and WCDMA handsets at much lower costs.

ABI Research predicts the global market for GPS-enabled handsets will grow from around 140 million handsets in 2007 to more than 600 million in 2012. In addition to major handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, RIM, and Samsung, smaller Asian ODMs including HTC, Quanta, and Inventec are introducing GPS-enabled devices.
Via : Traffic Technology Today