Home Grown NavIC System for Smartphone Manufacturers; Details Inside

In Brief

Smartphones have become a basic necessity of life similar to the three basic necessities- food, water, and oxygen, where you need to constantly have your handset by your side in the pocket or handbag as it contains all the information about you.

Over the years, smartphones have evolved from being mere devices of convenience for calling and messaging to upgraded, futuristic models that people of all age groups are now relying upon to solve their daily problems.

Every smartphone’s viability depends on the brand that manufacturers it for it is the brand value of the device that will attract users to its name so that they can theorize what kind of device it will be.

All handsets have a specific shelf life and what is considered new today will become old and outdated tomorrow. This is the reason why every brand has to upgrade and evolve all its devices so that it caters to the present generation.

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The latest report doing the rounds is that the Indian government has advised the phone manufacturers to make their models compatible with the new indigenous NavIC System by the end of 2022 or early 2023.

The government wants to create an alternative to the massively popular and widely used GPS, which was created in the US and the Indian government wants to create its new counterpart so that India has its own GPS.

Basically, the government wants the NavIC System to be “India’s Answer to GPS”. However, this has become a cause of worry for other renowned tech giants like Apple, Xiaomi, Samsung, and their ilk.

The Central government has set January 23, 2023, as the deadline for all smartphone brands to fully equip their handsets with the NavIC System, which is all but implausible as of late as such a short period is not enough for all devices to be equipped with NavIC.

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The aforementioned tech giants held numerous meetings in the August-September 2022 time frame to discuss the challenges and obstacles of implementing such advanced technology in all future smartphone models and raised their concerns that it will lead to disastrous consequences in case it went wrong.

They argued that such technology requires very high production costs and complicated hardware/software changes that would take an insurmountable amount of time and the given deadline was not enough to get the project even halfway through.

Xiaomi and Samsung smartphones have a problem in inculcating NavIC System support as the costs would be extremely high for the dual-brand chipsets to support both GPS and NavIC.

It also includes conducting many tests to get clearance from authorities to go ahead with the project for which the January 2023 deadline is far from enough, which will lead to further delays in launching the NavIC System.

Conclusion

NavIC stands for Navigation for Indian Constellation whose navigation system will be developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which will be for both military and commercial purposes.

There are a number of smartphones that have come with the NavIC System support, which closely numbers around 300 models but given the tense situation in managing everything out in such a short while, it is likely that the Indian government will either push the date of deadline or come up with some solutions to help the makers out.

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