SiRF Technologies (SIRF) will have their GPS technology embedded in the two new Motorola (MOT) phones coming in October. In 2007 there should be about eight follow-on phones that use the SiRF Global Positioning System (GPS) chips, including some using the GSM/EDGE standard to target China and others using the WCDMA/HSDPA standard to target Europe. Some of these phones will be very high-volume devices, and others will be expensive, high-feature models.

Wall Street is seeing SiRF's domination of personal navigation devices, such as those made by Garmin (GRMN) and TomTom (TMOAF), under attack. What The Street is missing is that the market for GPS chips in cell phones is literally 100 times as large. SiRF has about 75% of the personal navigation device market, but the opportunity in cell phones is much, much larger. As long as the company can keep driving costs down to protect their margins as chip prices fall, Wall Street will be positively surprised by the results. The carriers want to sell smartphones with more features and extra revenue from additional services, so we can be sure that GPS will continue to spread rapidly into almost all handsets. SiRF is already in the new BlackBerry 8300, which is a big success.