Ceramic core
The secret appears to be ceramic material at the core of the Sarantel antenna, pictured below. This, claims Sarantel, enables the antenna to provide ‘sub-meter' accuracy even when kept in the user's pocket. "The big thing is that people will use it for audio messaging related to location so it's got to work in your pocket," says Wither.
There is a general consensus among market researchers that the proportion of handsets that are GPS-enabled is set to grow rapidly over the next few years. LBS is expected to be the commercial driver for this. Applications like pedestrian navigation, location driven alerts and location based social networking and gaming will potentially create a whole new marketplace for businesses to interact with consumers.
But this isn't going to happen overnight. We ask Wither how the handset industry is responding to his product. "The handset guys are slowly coming round to the idea," he says. "I've read that by 2012 half of mobile phone handsets will be GPS enabled. NVIDIA wants to do a real time 3D rendering of the user's immediate physical environment but if the building you're standing in front of isn't the same as is on the screen then there's a problem."
One hurdle would be the price premium created by the addition of this extra component, but Wither reckons this could be kept pretty low. "At appropriate volume the cost implications to the handset could be as little as a dollar," he says.
