The ASUS R50A Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) was recently announced as an honoree for the 2008 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Best of Innovations Design and Engineering Awards in the Computer Hardware category. ASUS was well represented with the R50A sharing honors with the very new and extremely popular, low cost PC, the Eee PC and the P527 GPS cell phone.

According to ASUS’s news release, the ASUS R50A comes with GPS, 3G / 3.5G connectivity, TV tuner, webcam, microphone and full notebook functionality. It’s a step up from the PDA platform without going to the form factor of a notebook computer. To achieve the ultra mobile tag there is no QWERTY keypad rather relying on a 4.8 inch, 1024 X 600 pixel resolution touchscreen combined with ASUS’s InfoPen software for data entry. The R50A’s size is similar to some of the larger screen car navigation GPS devices available.

ASUS’s R50A ultra mobile computing platform integrating Internet connectivity with GPS capability is a move towards a future including GPS connected navigation devices. With an expected rapid rise in LBS (Location Based Services), GPS devices will become more find and navigate devices rather than navigation devices. Points of Interest from a static database will no longer be acceptable to consumers expecting dynamically updated location based search results.

GPS devices without Internet connectivity are on a path to extinction. You only have to look at Nokia’s recent strategic purchase of Navteq as evidence of corporate acceptance of the bright future for connected navigation devices.

It is not just LBS that will boost the demand for products like the ASUS R50A. Consumers will expect location aware software applications as well. For example, address books will be expected to be location aware even in real time if someone has agreed to ongoing sharing of their location with you.

The roll out rate for new location based services and software is set to jump dramatically due a number of factors such as:

• the rapid proliferation of GPS enabled devices
• reduced development times and easier deployment of location based software applications stemming from the release of multiple phone and carrier programming platforms such as the one recently released by uLocate
• the maturing and simplifying of GPS applications as evidenced by examples such as WHERE, the world’s first wireless GPS widget platform

We are on the edge of a rapid phase of development with expectations like those from market analyst Strategy Analytics prediction of the LBS market growing from some 200 million dollars in 2006 to 1.2 billion in 2011. It’s time for all manufacturers to start looking at what mobile connected computing platforms, such as the ASUS R50A, consumers will be looking for in the near future.

Further Reading

Read our review of Yahoo! Zurfer, a research prototype application from Yahoo! Research Berkeley which brings the location based photo browsing functionalities of Flicker to mobile devices.

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Technorati Tags: UMPC, GPS, 3G / 3.5G connectivity, TV tuner, webcam, ASUS’s InfoPen software, ultra mobile computing, location based services

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