GPS Passion

Next Gen iPhone with GPS and ?

Hi! It's good to have you back. We hope you like our site!
You may want to subscribe to our GPS Passion RSS feed. We appreciate your comments, so let us know what you think.
Follow us on Twitter: gpspassionnet.
Please visit us again soon! - DutchClick

The Street comes with the news that the next gen iPhone will have a GPS on-board. It is said to be supplied by Global Locate (that just have been bought by chipmaker Broadcom in July) and is going to include A-GPS, which is GPS signal helped by taking crossbearings of cellular network signal. The iPhone will be expected in Q1 of 2008.
This is the good news.

The question will be whether it will have 3G UMTS or the already old skool 2.5G GPRS/EDGE, that last one is just turned of by Telfort in The Netherlands for instance. In Europe UMTS is the thing!

via GPSlodge

TomTom to release gps enabled cell phone ?

TomTom has a good reputation as manufacturer of navigation software and hardware. Tomtom started making navigation software for organisers and smartphones, and Palm was one of the first manufacturers you could run the application on. When Tomtom started making their own hardware, they managed to make it behave exactly the same way as the software versions from before. And it has always been the easo of the menus, the smart structure and the added features that made people love tomtoms. And now it seems Tomtom is working on something new : a gps enable smartphone.

Notably, Hewlett-Packard (HP), other branded handset vendors such as O2 and i-mate, and the two leading GPS devices vendors, TomTom and Garmin, are likely soon to launch their own-brand GPS PDA smartphones, the sources revealed. (Digitimes)

I wonder if this will do any good in the cell phone market. At the same time, it is interesting news. Maybe Tomtom prefers selling their own hardware for support purposes ?

Is Tomtom leaving it’s roots ?

Asus first to put GPS into notebook computer

Former motherboard maker Asus has grown into a multi discipline company, with pda’s and personal navigation devices and laptops in its range.

One of its newest laptop computers, the goodlooking U3S, would be coming with a built in GPS chip, but it seems that it is not standard, but optional:

With the U3, users can enjoy one of the following three optional features: turbo memory, 3G connectivity and global positioning system (GPS). …. The GPS guides the way with precision and ease for versatile functionality.
Asus global website

When I did read about it, I thought it could be the first result of the Intel – Sirf deal, but that would be far to early I think. Now we also know that the U3S

uses NXP Software’s swGPS(TM) Spot software GPS baseband technology to perform all necessary GPS signal processing entirely in software, allowing users to access the fast-growing range of location-based services from navigation and local search to mobile social networking, or theft protection.
GPS Business News

German Magazine Focus Online did take a look, but could not get the accompanied navigation software to work with the built in GPS, Commander Matting tells us (in German only).

via: The Register

Toyota is embedding TomTom in car dashboard

The Frankfurt IAA auto show is showing a lot of new cars and car related stuff. Together with Toyota TomTom comes with an embedded GPS device.

It will be a part of the built in radio console of the latest Toyota Yaris. The Eclipse AVN 2210p is developed by Fujitsu Ten and TomTom.

I think it looks nice.

via Engadget