Having recently released two mobile phones with built-in GPS receivers (the glorious Nokia N95 and cheaper Nokia 6110), Nokia have thrown down the gauntlet to Sat-Nav manufacturers by claiming that GPS will feature throughout its entire range in the not-too distant future.

Talking about GPS, Kai Oistamo, head of Nokia’s Mobile Phones unit, said at a recent news conference “I believe it will quickly go through almost the whole of our portfolio.”

According to Berg Insight, the Sat-Nav market is set to grow from 1 million units in 2005 to 12 million in 2009, and so it’s no surprise that mobile phone manufacturers want a piece of the action.

With digital cameras already pervasive throughout all manufacturers’ mobile phone portfolios, a new feature is needed to keep the mobile momentum going.

Sat-Nav and mapping features should do just that, and now that GPS technology has shrunk enough to fit inside a mobile phone both physically and economically, the time for ubiquitous GPS mobile phones is just about right.

The buzz surrounding Nokia’s N95 certainly shows there’s enough interest in Sat-Nav phones, too, and as Nokia have clearly demonstrated the market’s potential, other mobile phone manufacturers should be rushing out their own versions of Sat-Nav phones soon (apart from Sony Ericsson and Motorola, of course, for whom ‘rushing’ means ‘walking along at a sedentary pace’!).

A plethora of Sat-Nav phones will see the mobile phone market dynamics shift somewhat. GPS does not rely on the mobile networks, so unlike mobile video, Sat-Nav features can’t be sold as a value-added service by the operators. However, additional location-based data, such as nearest restaurants, cinemas, ATMs, etc., can be sold as a value-add, and the operators are expected to add these features to their services as the Sat-Nav phones increase in popularity.

All this would seem to be a direct threat to stand-alone Sat-Nav device manufactuers such as Tom-Tom, and it will be interesting to see how they respond to the threat. Already Tom-Tom have introduced a Sat-Nav device that can take a mobile phone SIM card, with the aim to keep the mobile in the user’s pocket, and the Sat-Nav firmly in the car.

Internet companies, such as Yahoo and Google, are also rumoured to be working on mobile mapping solutions, potentially providing the extra mapping data (shops, restaurants, cinemas, etc.) that network operators or even the handset manufacturers themselves are looking to provide (Nokia bought Gate5 last year to provide routing data for its Nokia N95).

As mobile phones begin to absorb the Sat-Nav, we can expect to see some innovative new handsets, and even more importantly, some innovative new mapping services, which could change the way we interact with the world.

If you thought the world of mobile phones had already made enough of a mark on society, think again – there’s more change on its way, with Nokia, as ever, right there at the front of it.

[Source: Tech Republic]