3G iPhone: Multimodal Location Awareness?

Om Malik reports that the hotly anticipated 3G iPhone, rumored to come out next month, will have GPS capability (by federal mandate). The provider is rumored to be Broadcom — a big win for the chip maker, which only recently entered the 3G chipset market.

Putting two and two together, this means we’re likely to see multimodal location awareness, given the iPhone’s existing Wi-Fi positioning software, care of Skyhook Wireless. The two together will open up lots of possibilities for local application development (a common theme with all things iPhone and Android).

With GPS and Wi-Fi positioning, essentially one picks up where the other leaves off. GPS is much more accurate (down to the meter level) but drops off in urban areas and indoors — places where Wi-Fi positioning has proved to shine. So they could be a powerful combination on an already powerful — and soon to be much faster — device.