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Alcatel and Istituto Geografico DeAgostini - a leading Italian publishing house, with an unrivalled expertise in cartography - have developed an advanced solution for location services, based on Assisted GPS technology.

By simply pressing a button, it will be possible to calculate the geographical position of a UMTS terminal on detailed and always updated maps, quicker and more precisely if compared with a standard GPS system. Moreover, this solution will reduce the amount of complex location calculations for the mobile terminal, and this will end up in battery savings.

This can be done thanks to the location server and the Java application EASYMAP - to be downloaded on the mobile terminal - that are part of the solution. The location server, developed by Alcatel, elaborates navigation signals complementary to GPS, thanks to the "European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service" called EGNOS (and to Galileo in the future). It offers better coverage in urban or indoor situations.

EASYMAP, the application developed by Istituto Geografico DeAgostini, allows an easy navigation on the map and provides all relevant features for searching for addresses, tracking routes, finding points of interest (e.g. restaurants, bars, hotels, ...).

The solution is another success in the partnership between the two companies that started almost one year ago and it has been developed at the Italian 3G Reality Centre of Alcatel in Vimercate (near Milan), a technological environment open to partners and customers, dedicated to the development of mobile and convergent products and solutions.

In fact, this is the evolution for UMTS/GPS terminals of EASYMAP application, developed for GSM terminals and launched on the market in 2004, with Alcatel One Touch 735i mobile phones.

"The portable phone is becoming a real mobile terminal allowing not only voice services, but also, video, data and location based services," said Jean-Michel Cornille, president of Alcatel's mobile solutions activities. "We are fully committed to the realization of a user-centric broadband world, where people can access the services from any location and using different terminals. And this is a clear example of how technologies can make everyday life easier."