Gps in mobile phones
- 2. •In 1999 Mobile phone manufacturer Benefon launched the first commercially-available GPS phone, a safety phone called the Benefon Esc! The GSM phone was sold mainly in Europe, but many other GPS-enabled mobile phones would follow.
- 3. • The Esc! was featured a large, greyscale LCD. Esc! allowed for users to load maps onto the phone, to trace their position and movement, and to call or send their coordinates via SMS to a list of set numbers by setting an "Emergency Key". It also featured a "Friend Find" service, whereby users with Esc! handsets could track each other's locations directly on their handset display.
- 5. The lowest form of GPS does the following: • Get some information from the cell phone company to feed to the GPS receiver - some of this is gross positioning information based on what cellular towers can 'hear' your phone, so by this time they already phone your location to within a city block or so. • Switch from cellular to GPS receiver for 0.1 second (or some small, practically unoticable period of time) and collect the raw GPS data (no processing on the phone). • Switch back to the phone mode, and send the raw data to the phone company • The phone company processes that data (acts as an offline GPS receiver) and send the location back to your phone.
- 6. This saves a lot of money on the phone design, but it has a heavy load on cellular bandwidth, and with a lot of requests coming it requires a lot of fast servers. Still, overall it can be cheaper and faster to implement.