GPS, mid-screen devices lead the way

GPS chips are nearly as cheap as, well, chips, and the price point is only going to come down further over the next year. Scott Pomerantz, President and CEO of chip maker Global Locate (www.globallocate.com) says it's less than $5 for a GPS chip today and he expects the price to go down to about $2 in 2008 As other chip companies move to smaller processes, Global Locate can take advantage of the "trailing edge" open manufacturing lines to make their bits both smaller and cheaper.

With a GPS chip at $2, you can literally put them everywhere. Global Locate is drooling over the cellular handset market, but putting GPS into mobile devices like Treos and other PDA are a no-brainer at even $4 dollars a chip just to add some extra value to the mundane little gadgets. Laptops also would seem to be a no-brainer, especially since the latest generation GPS chip is small enough to be mistaken for a piece of support circuitry on a motherboard. We're talking something that's 3.7 mm by 3.5 mm in size - you can literally fit a couple of them on a dime.

But thinking beyond the obvious, GPS is likely to become a standard feature for practically every type of wireless device imaginable, including Wi-Fi and WiMAX devices and whatever other futuristic radio-based devices come out of the labs in the next few years. A number of proposed "smart radio" concepts want geo-location capability so they can tap into a database that tells them what free frequencies are available in the area. For example, if you are in North Dakota, there are a lot of empty TV channels that translate into hundreds of megabits of available bandwidth.

If you're running around with a dual-mode Wi-Fi phone, be it a Skype phone or more mainstream VoIP flavor, having a GPS "fix" of a couple of meters enables rapid emergency services action, location-based services, location-based advertising, and even more advanced ideas such as "Here-I-Am" type services when you want to find someone.

"Here-I-Am" service? Let's say I wanted to find Charlie Demerjian at CES in the middle of the chaos of Las Vegas and he wants to find me. Our GPS-enabled devices exchange tokens that say "Hi, for this user, provide position information for the duration of event." When I've got a minute, I pull out my phone/PDA, punch "Where's Charlie?" and get a relative position update. Or Charlie is tapping me on the shoulder.

You'll also see GPS chips show up in what I am dubbing "Mid-Screen" devices. There's a sweet spot between "big screen" laptops around 14- to 15-inches. Some are going to quibble with me that 14-inches isn't that bag. Others are going to say 14-inches is already too small, just stay with me. And let's not forget PDA-sized devices such as the iPaq and Apple's "iPhone." Devices like the Sony PSP and Nokia's Internet tablets are at the bottom end of the "mid-screen."

Many people are going to want to view their stored and mobile video on a screen larger than a runty little cell phone handset or an iPod. They'll want something larger that can easily go into a handbag or man-bag, has anywhere from a 5 to 7 inch up to a 10-inch screen for watching entertainment or reading The Inq on the go.

The Samsung Ultra-Mobile PC Q1 is a mid-screen device, but one running Windows XP. At $999 list, it's a bit more than double what people are going to want to shell out. Further, you don't need - and frankly don't want - Windows XP for a mid-screen device - that's too much overhead, too many ways to suck the battery dry. Hopefully, we'll see some Linux-based mid-screens later this year and Apple will likely wait until next year before unveiling its flavour of a mid-screen device, calling it a "FatPod" or something equally interesting. µ