Why GPS on the iPhone matters

LONDON, UK -- Apple honcho Steve Jobs unveiled the new 3Gesus Phone yesterday, along with the promise of a universe of third-party applications and services to go with it. The iPhone's faster data performance and lower handset price are nice, but the addition of GPS to the iPhone, although widely expected, was the biggest story of the day. Here's why.

As the consumer electronics Mother of All Convergence Devices, cell phones have gobbled up a long list of former stand-alone gadgets, from PDAs to media players to gaming systems to digital cameras. In the past couple of years, GPS gadgets have been miniturized and baked right in to higher-end phones as well.

These haven't been fully taken advantage of in part because of high prices charged for some GPS-based cell phone services, but mostly because of a lack of compelling location-based applications and services. Right now, most people who use the GPS in their phones just get turn-by-turn directions, which can be useful, but isn't very exciting anymore. In fact, it's been a chick-and-egg situation in which the cell phone using masses don't find cell phone GPS compelling because of a lack of applications and services, and the industry doesn't find the creation of such apps and services worthwhile because of a lack of users.

It's difficult to measure such things, but I believe the Jobs announcement forced a kind of tipping point that "mainstreamed" GPS in phones. The steep rise in GPS in phones was inevitable anyway -- ABI Research predicts that more than 550 million GPS-enabled phones will ship within the next four years -- but the Apple Seal of Approval, along with generous sprinkles of Steve Jobs magic marketing pixie dust, rapidly accellerated the process. As Jobs said yesterday, "It's going to explode."

The announcement was made to developers in the context of promoting the creation of third-party, location-based applications and services to The Faithful, who will gladly pay for -- and create a real market for -- the best GPS apps that will inevitably come out for the iPhone. Plus, the iPhone with its huge, beautiful screen is uniquely suited for super-usable location-based services and GPS-happy applications.

Big deal, right? Another gadgets gets converged into mainstream phones -- so what? Here's why GPS is different. GPS devices carried in cell phones by just about everybody is an enabler technology that will lead us into totally unexpected, unpredictable but culture-changing application areas. GPS is like electricity. Or computers. Or the Internet. It's a technology that makes a universe of other things possible that aren't at all obvious at the outset. But it will only become transformational when everyone's got it in their pocket.

By contrast, the addition of, say, MP3 player technology built into a handset or the addition of digital cameras aren't really going to change the world. You'll just listen to music and take pictures. Cool, but they don't really enable massive, unpredictable changes in the way anybody lives.

Here's an incomplete list of the applications that already exist for this infant technology:

• Location-based social networking
• Geo-tagged photos
• "Invisible grafitti" (you get messages only when you're in a specific place)
• Real-time traffic monitoring
• Parental monitoring of the location of children and teens
• Emergency services that know where you are (even if you don't)
• Turn-by-turn directions, even for pedestrians
• Location-based advertising
• Time, weather, restaurant recommendations, movie showtimes, etc., based on where you are

Within the next year or two, I expect dozens or hundreds of new applications to emerge that will put this list to shame, some of which will also go mainstream and change the way we work, play and live.

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