Over 550 Million GPS-Enabled Handsets Will Ship by 2012

Cellular carriers have started to offer on-board and off-board navigation solutions, as well as a range of LBS (Location Based Services) such as friend finder and local search on GPS handsets.

"While most CDMA handsets are already GPS-enabled and GPS is set to become a standard feature in GSM smartphones, GSM feature phones are next on the agenda to be equipped with GPS technology," says ABI Research principal analyst Dominique Bonte. "GPS chipset vendors increasingly target handsets, looking for new markets and spurred on by the recent dramatic growth of personal navigation devices."

In this case, the cost, power consumption, and footprint of GPS chipsets will be reduced. This will be made possible by single chipset technology and the emergence in 2009 of combination chips integrating GPS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi all on one die. Major silicon vendors such as Broadcom, NXP, and Atheros are well positioned to develop such solutions following the acquisition of GPS chipset vendors Global Locate, GloNav, and u-Nav, respectively.