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With Japan and the US raging ahead with their mobile phone technology, Europe finally has a glimmer of hope that the same technology will be readily available in the very near future

In the first nine months of 2006, nearly 12 million Global Positioning System (GPS) devices were sold across the world; it’s expected to double to nearly 28 million in 2007 as more people want to know exactly where they are at any given time.

Most GPS systems are used by motorists navigating around the roads, sailors determining their position on the ocean and ramblers taking extreme walks up hillsides. But this is all set to change according to the mobile industry. This year, they expect that GPS will finally go side by side with mobile phones across Europe. Japan already has GPS implemented into their mobile phones, which they find a necessity in their day to day life.

With mobile GPS, users will be able to take advantage of a range of new services from restaurant finders to systems that accurately plot their morning run.

Unlike the US and Japan, which use a mobile standard known as CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), Europe's networks run on a totally different system called GSM (Global System for Mobile communication). But with new developments in chip designs, and the increased processing power of mobile phones, it means that GPS can now more easily be incorporated into a mobile phone handset. Also, a new technology called assisted GPS (AGPS) gets rid of frustrating lag times which come with normal GPS devices as they attempt to lock on to satellites. It takes advantage of the cellular network to speed up the process of finding a location.

Mobile operators divide the whole country into thousands of individual geographic areas known as “cells”.  At the centre of each of these cells is a base station or mast, which communicates by radio with individual mobiles within that designated area. The cells information can be used to get a rough fix on the location of the mobile users, and once known, a computer can relay the information to the mobile about which satellite it should connect too. This then stops the phone searching for signals from all of the 32 satellites in the GPS constellation.

This new level of accuracy has allowed countries such as US and Japan to include features such as “buddy finders” in their phones, which alerts people when their friends are in the same area. The technology can also track your morning run to show how many kilometers you have covered and how many calories you have burned. This exciting technology is set to make its way over to Europe in the near future.

One major feature which took off in Japan and the US is the ability for parents to track their children through their phone. Disney even launched a service to entice more users!

With this technology on the way, research has indicated that number of GPS-enabled mobile phones is expected to soar from around three million last year to nearly 70 million in 2010. Globally, the figure will be close to 300 million.

What seems to be the down side of this technology is the battery life of the new handsets. GPS car devices have car chargers which slot into the cigarette lighter and keep the battery life at a high. Mobile phones have a smaller battery than the car systems, and it is not expected that people will willingly carry around a portable charger for their phones. Mobile phones are already battery hungry with today’s features, such as mp3 players and Bluetooth, but with turn-by-turn navigation like the systems used in cars, it will be a problem to keep the phone alive for more than a few hours at a time. Consequently, manufacturers are working hard to pack more power into handsets.

Another problem with the GPS is the range it will work within. At the moment, the GPS is still not quite good enough for all applications to work in all areas. One development on the horizon that could solve this is Europe's GPS equivalent, known as Galileo.

Galileo offers an additional 30 satellites which present greater coverage and precision than the existing GPS system. A downfall is that it will require new technology to be incorporated into mobile phones, particularly in mobile chip sets.

Regardless of the problems mobile GPS may encounter, it is believed that the integration of GPS into mobile phones was destined to happen, because of the vast majority of the world owning a mobile phone.  It is a surprise that everyone has a device to tell them the time, and that sits perfectly on their wrist. But at the same time, we do not have a universal device for telling us where we are. Time and place are two of the most basic ways for mapping our lives, and mobile phones will lead the way in providing us with the fundamentals we are without today.