Orange Announce Mass Market GPS Navigation Services Q2 2004

[Guest mcwarre]

Dunno if it has been mentioned before, but

'Recently, Orange France announced plans to mass-market GPS navigation services available on its network in Q2 2004. The handset offered with this service is an Orange Microsoft Windows Mobile powered SPV but the location based software is also compatible with devices like Nokia's 6600 and 3650 models. "Mobile phones and PDAs were not powerful enough before to handle such services. Now they have the Symbian OS, Microsoft Mobile OS, a lot of memory, a decent colour screen and Bluetooth to connect them to the GPS," said Klinger (Vice President of sales at navigation software firm Webraska). "Consumer wise, we expect a mass market [for location based services] in six to 12 months from now," he added.'

The services they envisage are 'traffic information, location, weather forecasts, route directions and others.' They also believe that operators could charge upto £75 per subscriber anually!

Note that this is different from Mapopolis which has already been announced; it is an Orange service.

Source: IEE Review April 2004