Samsung's SCH-V850 A-GPS cellphone with NATE Drive

by Thomas Ricker posted Mar 30th 2006 at 8:30AM

Samsung just unleashed their new SCH-V850 Assisted GPS cellphone with NATE drive navigation service. Yeah, don't worry if you don't know what NATE is, it's one of those cutting-edge A-GPS services providing real-time traffic situations, family locations, navigation instructions, and more -- a service Korean's are accustomed to while we toil away in our tech backwaters to kick at the dirt. Anyway, the handset features a 262k color 2-inch QVGA TFT display, 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, and EV-DO data to carry all that info. The phone should come to SK Telecom (read: not to the US) for about 500,000 KRW or $512 USD.

Filed under: Handsets, EV-DO

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Neutral

Jarmayn @ Mar 30th 2006 11:39AM

Wow, NATE navigation does look kool, I tried a quick Google search to no avail, anyone have any more information on it? GUI looks great and it does look like it has a lot of advanced features. One thing I would like on GPS navigation for mobiles is satellite imagery, just like on Google Map!--www.e-fuze.com mobile

Neutral

AFD @ Mar 30th 2006 8:14PM

"anyone have any more information on it?"

The NATE Drive homepage (Korean) can be found at:

http://drive.nate.com/

And SK Telecom has a brief overview of NATE Drive at:

http://www.sktelecom.com/eng/services/nate/index.html

Neutral

Jamar @ Mar 31st 2006 7:30AM

No, not exactly- NATE is the data component of the phone (like Sprint PCS Vision) and NATE Drive is the navigation part of NATE- a Korean friend of mine helped clarify on that. And, who's to say that Helio won't take on something like this? They're derived from SK Telecom, right...?

Neutral

Dan @ Mar 31st 2006 3:00PM

Here's one link I found on the aforemention drive.nate.com website. It shows two phones that have been available since last year, and these phones are optimized for NATE Drive service, with dedicated navigation buttons on the faceplates. These keys include map rotate(cw, ccw), map center, map zoom(in, out), and a few others. The pictures on the page show some of the screen shots, and they seem to be similar to what we see on the SCH-V850 above. Overall they look pretty good.

http://drive.nate.com/jsp/handset/sub05_02.jsp

Neutral

Nick @ Mar 31st 2006 6:25PM

Tech backwaters???

I've had AGPS on my hw6515 since I bought it a few months back. It works great here in the Washington DC metro area. I don't have the traffic conditions on my GPS, but only because I chose not to pay for that option with my TomTom software.

Neutral

mapajegio @ Apr 1st 2006 10:44PM

Your hw6515 has plain old GPS, not AGPS. AGPS means that your position is partially determined with the help of the wireless network, instead of strictly US gov't satellites. I'm assuming the NATE system fires mapping info over EVDO, instead of requiring a basemap to be preloaded onto the phone/unit. Somebody correct me if I'm way out to lunch on this.

Neutral

Nick @ Apr 3rd 2006 10:15AM

#6, you need to check your facts before responding foolishly. A company called Global Locate built the AGPS software that's embedded in the hw65xx series of pocket pc's.

You can check out their website at
http://www.globallocate.com/
and you can check the GPS firmware on any hw65xx pocket pc to verify that it is the AGPS Global Locate software that is being used.

MSMOBILES.COM also had an article on the latest AGPS version upgrade for the hw65xx. http://msmobiles.com/news.php/4859.html

Cheers.

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