Xiaomi will soon be bringing a technology built by the Indian Space Agency ISRO in its smartphones in India. The Chinese smartphone maker announced the same recently, confirming NavIC to be the said technology to be brought to its Redmi series of devices.
For those unaware, NavIC is the operational service meant to provide location based tracking and other position-based service to users. It is enabled by the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) and even provides the users a messaging service apart from a plethora of other features.
The service acts much like GPS in regular smartphones, only limited to users in India. ISRO¡¯s NavIC is already enabled in several of the smartphones in the market that are backed by Qualcomm¡¯s Snapdragon processors.
Xiaomi has now ramped up this integration of the service with the Qualcomm chipsets and its own smartphones. Xiaomi claims to have undertaken much R&D efforts for this.
Using NavIC, Xiaomi smartphone users will be able to use navigational services on land, in air as well as over water. The said tracking will also enable linked features like vehicle tracking for fleet management, timing accuracy, navigation for travellers and more. On a larger scale, the said technology will allow mapping of an area, geodetic data capture and other such exercises to be carried out.
All this will be backed by two crucial aspects of the technology - Standard Positioning Service (SPS)? for all users as well as Restricted Service (RS) or an encrypted service meant only for authorised users.
State-of-the-art technologies like NavIC have always trickled down to the masses in some form or the other. A similar use-case was found for GPS technology, after it was first developed for the US military. Similarly, ISRO came up with Bhuvan back in 2015, a web based utility that provides users set of map based content prepared by the space agency. NavIC, with its integration in Xiaomi smartphones, now seems to be the next space technology ready to reach the Indian masses.