Skyhook Wireless brings Wi-Fi location to Symbian OS

In addition to the increased adoption of cell phone-based vehicle navigation, there has been an explosion of new and interesting location based services in recent months, including pedestrian navigation, local search and advertising, friend finding, social networking, local events and geo-tagging of photos – all applications that require location technology that works everywhere.

According to Patrick Connolly, research director at IMS Research, rural areas and highways are not the most lucrative markets for LBS, therefore handsets that combine Skyhook's Wi-Fi location with other location technologies to ensure functionality in metro areas and indoors will generate the most revenue.

In order for LBS to continue its accelerated growth trajectory, location sensing technology has to be ‘consumer grade', and must quickly and accurately provide location information in the places where these applications are used.

While existing mobile location technology such as A-GPS and cellular triangulation are an important part of the solution, these technologies have accuracy and availability issues indoors and in urban environments.

The Wi-Fi Positioning System can be easily integrated with Symbian's LBS architecture to address these issues and to optimise location accuracy, coverage, and time to fix across all environments.

Connected Vehicles