The Register reports that Blue Sky Positioning has announced their GPS enabled SIM card at SIMposium, in Berlin. The company has apparently managed to fit an entire GPS receiver onto a SIM card. The entire system, including the antenna, fits onto the card, but processing is done by your phone. The unit had to be an A-GPS (Assisted GPS) system because the SIM card is standardized “to draw six milliamps, which was a challenge,” explains Risto Savolainen, Blue Sky CEO. That sounds just fine by us. If they manage to get decent reception out of the tiny GPS SIM card, we’ll gladly hand off the processing task to our CPUs.
The announcement opens up a vast number of phones to GPS upgrading by simply swapping the SIM card. Lower-end models will likely use the service for text-based location data, whereas higher-end Symbian and Windows Mobile phones will be able to take full advantage of the GPS system and enable full location, mapping, and route planning services. The first samples are slated for July 2007, so we’ll have to wait a few months to verify Blue Sky’s claim.