Telmap & BlueSky deliver A-GPS sim card based navigation solution

If your phone doesn’t have built-in location features (and it won’t if it’s a low cost device), then decent GPS navigation will require you to go and buy a personal navigation device or “PND” as they are known. Often that PND could end up costing 5 times as much as your actual handset.

What do you do if you’ve got 5,000 employees all using some fairly reliable handsets without GPS facilities… and you’d like to give them all mobile navigation service?

The answer is talk with BlueSky Positioning and Telmap. They’ve integrated real-time location-based navigation services into a sim card with A-GPS facilities.

I like the idea of being able to augment mid-range handsets in this way. You can run it on cheap-as-chips handsets but they’ll need to be able to run the Telmap software (which might be a big ask).

For most people, A-GPS (“network-assisted-GPS”) is a fairly good alternative. You won’t necessarily get a precise location fix, but it should be good enough to handle most navigation requirements.

Since we’re talking about the sim card, there’s a lot of potential possibilities there for operators to control the offering, particularly for specific market segments and not necessarily for consumers.

You can read more about the offering here.