GPS Market To Experience 5-Fold Increase, According To IMS Research

IMS Research is reporting a 5-fold increase in the GPS Consumer Market, thanks to laptop computers and digital cameras. In their “The Worldwide Market for GPS/GNSS-enabled Portable Devices—2007 Edition”, GPS is going to be integrated into a number of portable devices, with an overall market increase of 5-fold by 2011. Twenty percent of the market will be represented by laptops and digital cameras. Matia Grossi, author of the report, says “Photo sites and online communities, e.g. Flickr and MySpace, need to maintain financial growth through traffic-based business; camera manufacturers need to differentiate in an increasingly competitive market; end users need new and innovative management functionalities for their offline pictures libraries. GPS is potentially the answer”.




The company also reveals some of the products involved in this market. A new software approach is being developed by NXP Software targeting the laptop and digital camera market. SnapSpot is a low cost/low power alternative that easily integrates into these devices, requiring little additional hardware (i.e. antenna, LNA and RF front-end). When taking a photo, SnapSpot captures 100ms of digitized GPS signal and stores it in memory. On downloading the photos to a PC, the location is calculated using remote servers. Asus has already introduced SnapSpot in its US3 laptops. Currently, other laptop and camera manufacturers have caught the navigation bug, which requires a more traditional GPS approach. This has driven the recent announcements from Qualcomm and other GPS suppliers in relation to these markets. While hardware GPS is fine for laptops, it will slow initial uptake in the camera market. IMS Research believes that software-based technologies will force manufacturers to change their minds and drive uptake of GPS and geo-tagging.