NaviGadget

iPhone rumors: that 12th icon maybe GPS

Jun 4, 2007 gps navigation, phones

We’ve been following most of the rumors about iPhone. One of those happens to be about the 12th icon that no one really have seen yet. This could be associated with a mysterious application. Could this be a navigation system?

It is also suggested that in one of the latest iPhone ads you can get a glimpse of the “get directions to here” button from Google Maps which does not necessarily mean an integrated GPS chip but is a good indicator. Or is it? How do we know it is not going to ask us “starting address” on the next screen like you do from your desktop?

At this point we don’t really think Apple made the effort to throw in a standalone GPS chip that would drive the battery life even shorter. Maybe an application to support an external bluetooth GPS receiver seems more sound at this point as we mentioned back in January in our “iPhone GPS – part 2” article. I guess we’ll see on the 29th.

Also don’t forget the talk about an AT&T salesman trying to sell some iPhone’s in bulk to a trucking company.

A local trucking company also confirmed that an AT&T salesman pitched selling the company a large number of iPhones at a discount, as low as $249 for a bulk order of over 100 phones. He promoted the iPhone as “a great way to monitor and track where the trucks were throughout the country by using its GPS functionality.” The salesman reportedly had a non-working demo of the iPhone, and said the units would be available on June 29th.