Nokia Boosts Quality and Speed of GPS Services

Today, Nokia announced a new service that drastically cuts the time it takes to utilize GPS services on a cell phone – a step that could push the cell phone industry closer to full-scale GPS-adoption.

Currently, GPS-enabled cell phones are slow to initiate a connection, taking up to three minutes to get a “first fix� on a location. The new service, dubbed A-GPS (Assisted GPS), can reduce that start-up time to one minute. Presumably, this makes using those location-based services much more appealing. Nokia will equip all future phones with built-in GPS with the new technology.

It’s a usability issue, really, and improving the connection speed is often a big step in making a new technology user-friendly. Thanks to the rollout of A-GPS, your phone might actually start to react as fast in real life as it does in the demos we often see. And that’s a good thing.

Best of all, the service is a firmware upgrade, so current Nokia N95 users have the opportunity to improve the GPS utility for free, by visiting the Nokia Software Updater.