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FIND THAT PHONE

Cellphones that use GPS satellite signals to give users access to location-based services will be cheaper and far less power-hungry in future, according to CEVA, a firm in San Jose, California.

The company’s software engineers have developed “XpertGPS”, a program that can allow phones to decode GPS signals via the same digital signal processing (DSP) chip that phones already use to convert analogue voice signals into digital form for transmission over the network. It only costs around $3 per phone, whereas separate GPS decoder chips currently add around $40 to a phone’s cost.

XpertGPS works by breaking…

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