A-GPS in a Sim Card from Sagem Orga & BlueSky

Getting a bit technical for a moment, I got a bit of news through from Sagem Orga, the chaps who make a lot of sim card and sim card related systems.

They’ve partnered with BlueSky Positioning to bring the world’s first Assisted-GPS Sim card to market.

Interesting.

Enter Francois Blanchard, Global Account Marketing Manager at Sagem Orga:

“The SIM is entering a new era where it can now be considered as a real service platform and a valuable device; the A-GPS enabled SIM card will reshape the way SIM cards are perceived by MNOs and end-users.”

I picked up this release as it points to a possible change in the marketplace: With this kind of offering, you won’t necessarily need to be sporting a 500 quid handset to get A-GPS related services.

The primary purpose of A-GPS SIM is to provide accurate positioning information of the phone to emergency services in case of an emergency call as required by E112 and E911 legislation in the EU and the U.S. respectively. In addition to this, it can support generic location-based services such as navigation, ‘find a place or person’ services, location-aware games, and many more.

I wonder how you get the A-GPS location off the sim card and into the handset? We shall see.

It’d be rather good if an operator, say 3UK (who already use USIMs) picked up this and began offering it to their consumers — they’d theoretically be able to offer all sorts of wickedly cool services.

We shall see…