GPS Accuracy Without A GPS ChipGPS Accuracy Without A GPS Chip

More and more phones today come with GPS chips that onboard software can tap into for location based services such as mapping, geotagging photos or just announcing your location via Twitter. The older a phone is though, the more likely it is to be lacking a GPS chip. Soon, that may be irrelevant.If you have been using Google Maps on your phone for several years, you may have noticed that the software was able to get close to your location even without a GPS chip. It does this by accessing information from several towers within range, testing signal strength and then doing some math to give you an approximate current location. It isn't good enough to distinguish between the location of a few houses, but is often better than you trying to find your current location yourself by using street signs or the position of the stars.

According to BusinessWeek, a company called GloPos has developed software technology that will give you your location between 1 and 40 meters. The low end of that range is well within GPS accuracy, and the only thing that you need to make it work is the software. According to the article, it does this by sending out small amounts of data to servers that returns the information nearly instantly. The phone's software then runs some calculations and returns very precise locations.

The trick now will be to get the software on these older phones. Devices that run Windows Mobile, Blackberry or other smartphones won't be a big deal because users can download and install whatever they want on their device - assuming a corporate policy doesn't block it. Getting the software on feature phones though will generally require the cooperation of the carriers. I have to believe though there are a lot of people with older phones that would love GPS capabilities on their phone and would pay a modest fee to add this service to it. I just hope the carriers don't try and charge too much or do something dumb like make it a monthly fee to run the software.

According to the company's web site, it should launch next week.