NAVIGON is introducing the first professional navigation solution for the iPhone!

The Europe map has been out for about a month. I have it for my jailbroken iPhone, but obviously I can't use it as I'm not in Europe. Reviewers say it's not bad, although disconnections occur from time to time. I guess that's the reason why TomTom uses a separate GPS chip in its cradle that's coming out later this summer.

The Navigon North America maps should be out anytime now.

With the beautiful large screen on the iPhone, this brings us closer to the "who needs a dedicated GPS" discussion again. The iPhone screen is terrific and is not that much smaller than a dedicated GPS unit, negating many of the comments of "cell phone screens are too small".

Kudos to Navigon for providing an informative FAQ. TomTom's announcement leaves a lot of technical operational details unanswered. Based on the success and the incredible number of both free and paid applications available for the iPhone, I can not imagine why anyone would be interested in the NuviPhone at this point.

It will be interesting to see the comments and experiences from the the early adopters.

What GPS hardware is in an IPhone? SiRF?

Broadcom BCM4750 G-GPS chip.

BCM4750 Product Details. The BCM4750 is a single-die CMOS GPS receiver used for tracking and navigation, primarily in mobile devices. Its massive parallel hardware correlators provide faster signal searches, accurate real-time navigation, improved tracking sensitivity and very low average power consumption. With tracking sensitivity of -162 dBm, the BCM4750 sets a new benchmark for the industry.

Enhanced tracking sensitivity allows GPS-enabled mobile devices to detect very weak signals including those partially blocked or reflected by buildings or other structures. In these environments, GPS units sometimes fail to achieve a location "fix" or take a long time to do so. With the high sensitivity of the new BCM4750 GPS receiver chip, these initial location fixes occur much faster and in many cases, the BCM4750 can get a fix where competitors' products do not get a fix at all. The BCM4750 also integrates a number of external components, resulting in a very small footprint to design GPS into mobile devices. A complete GPS solution featuring the BCM4750 will use less than 35 mm2 of board space, including all of the necessary components for a typical cellular phone implementation.

BCM4750 Software. The BCM4750 includes software that is optimized for cellular integration and the demands of international standards bodies -- such as 3GPP and SUPL -- that promote high speed data in cellular systems. The software includes message handling protocols for user and control plane-assisted GPS standards, as well as native support for LTO extended ephemeris service. In addition, the software has been optimized for personal navigation performance and includes sophisticated algorithms to mitigate multipath errors.