“GPS is about to become a standard feature in mass-market handsets which are highly advanced and support third party applications. Many will try and a few players will most likely succeed in creating location-enabled mobile applications that will have the same impact on the mobile industry as MySpace and Facebook had on the Internet.”

High adoption rates will however not immediately translate into high revenues. LBS providers are going to have to depend on advertising sales in the same way as other online players. The mobile advertising eco-system is still undeveloped and needs many more years to become mature.

“First there must be a critical mass of active users to work with, then someone must create a successful model for reaching out to these individuals via their handsets and after that the mobile media must be embraced by the top spenders in the advertising industry”, said André.

Mobile phones featuring Symbian’s LBS offering were recently launched in Japan. In Europe, Symbian’s LBS architecture will appear in mobile phones later this year. Symbian SQL will be featured in phones shipping in the second half of 2008 and be available to application developers via a download in Q2 2008.

“When I authored SQLite in 2000, I never imagined that it would one day be used in mobile phones to host databases with millions of searchable entries,” said Dr. Richard Hipp, architect and primary author of SQLite. “The advanced design of Symbian OS meshes well with SQLite, resulting in a stable and robust platform for supporting new applications. I look forward to seeing the innovation that Symbian SQL sparks from developers across the world.”

The Symbian’s LBS architecture enables:

• Tracking by emergency services (as mandated by government legislation in some regions
• Providing the quickest route – getting from A to B as quickly as possible
• Accurate pin-pointing of current location
• Geotagging images and videos – location stamping images and videos
• Finding the location of people in a contacts list
• Locating the nearest services
• Providing proximity alerts when near a specific location