Here at the Mobile World Congress 2008, almost every handset brand worth its salt has a portfolio of GPS enabled phones. All the phones that Sony Ericsson has announced at the event are GPS enabled, ditto for Nokia. What is different, however, is the fact that GPS-enabled cellphones are not just meant for in-car navigation.

GPS in these phones are being used for a variety of purposes like geo-blogging, geo-tagging and even pedestrian navigation. Take for instance, the Nokia 6220 Navigator. The device has a built-in compass along with a GPS receiver for pedestrian navigation and its shows the direction in which the user is walking and orients the map accordingly to make following map directions less confusing.

Sony Ericsson, which has announced its GPS-enabled Cyber-Shot phones at the show have enabled the phone to tag photographs with the geographic co-ordinates of the phone. The user can then later transfer those photographs on a map or even arrange them according to various cities or locations. If you already have a GPS-enabled phone, you can try doing the same via Locr (www.locr.com), which activates the GPS when you click photographs using the application.

According to Kai Öistämö, executive vice president, devices, Nokia, believes that GPS-enabled cellphones will no longer be a feature in high-end devices but will pentrate into most cellphones. Nokia will be incorporating inbuilt GPS receivers even in its mid-end phones running on the Series 40 platform later this year. Now that is something that we hope is a promise that Nokia intends to deliver.