Design And Implementation Of GPS Navigation System Based On Smartphone

Nowadays,GPS navigation has become hotter and hotter in IT industry.According to a report by www.canalys.com,2,500,000 embedded GPS navigation units have been manufactured in 2^ndquarter of 2006,96.6%up as against the same quarter of 2005,a big rise trend. Actually GPS navigation has been very popular in western countries.Similarly,smartphones has gained more and more popularity over the world.Per www.palminfocenter.com,64,000,000 smartphones were manufactured in the year of 2006.More and more ordinary people are becoming the owners of a smartphone.Meanwhile,Blackberry series smartphones manufactured by Research In Motion(RIM)in Canada has gained the greatest market share among all the smartphone vendors-in year 2006,3,500,000 BlackBerry devices were sold,10%increasing rate against year 2005.On the other hand,according to Isuppli,a market research institute, from year 2006 to year 2011 the shipment of GPS enabled mobile phones will quadruple,from 109,600,000 to 444,000,000.Per ccidnet.com,GPS mobile phones have a market share of about 2.3%.As 3G develops,this number will become 20%by year 2011.Moreove,more than 50% BlackBerry devices are internally integrated with GPS module,enabling itself to run location based services by nature.Compared to expertised GPS navigation products,mobile phone based navigation systems have their unique advantages:they are more portable,lower price,always online,and more flexisible subscription/unsubscription to the service.Because of all these advantages,mobile phone based navigation systems are drawing more and more attention.According to a recently published research investigation report by In-stat,GPS enabled mobile phones have yet a large room to develop:93.7 of the interviewees said they hoped mobile phones can be integreated with navigation function,while 39.8%of them showed their strong interest in location-based service(LBS)such as local point of interests search and navigation.It's clear that in the near future navigation service will become a very important function in mobile services.Based on the above analysis,it's meaningful and lucrative to study and design of the cutting-edge GPS navigation application on the most popular BlackBerry phones that have 3D moving map and many other fancy features.This article analyzes BlackBerry platform architecture and comes up with a solution on how to develop navigation system handset software on Blackberry after reviewing the platform's core system functions like UI,GPS,data persistence level architecture,audio,and audio.The technologies involved in realizing a BlackBerry smart phone based GPS navigation system can be divided into two categories:client side technoligies and server side technologies.Client side technoligies can be further divided into J2ME programming,BlackBerry SDK programming,computer graphics programming,and GPS related technologies;Server side technologies,however,are composed of WEB server,database access,and GIS(Geographical Information System) technologies.This article will mainly focus on client side technologies only.This article describes following parts:1.Analyze each core system API,especially user interface and GPS API's,and comes to the conclusion that it's feasible to develop GPS navigation system that has 3D moving maps.2.Determine client-server architecture and the interfaces between the client software and the servers.3.Finish the client side software module design and most of the coding work.4.Enhance the software by fixing some of the critical defects in the last generation of the software.