Sagem Orga and BlueSky Positioning have announced a rather intriguing product, a SIM card with a built-in A-GPS receiver. The simply named A-GPS SIM will allow pretty much any mobile phone to get GPS support, although there's a catch.

It seems like the kind of support that will be added isn't for use with navigation software, but rather for locating the handset. This is meant to make it easier for the emergency services to be able to track down a caller using a mobile phone.

We can see the benefit of this, but hopefully this can be taken to the next level and allow certain devices to interface with the A-GPS receiver to work as a GPS add-on for the handsets. Although there's no mention of this kind of functionality in the press release, it's not improbable that it might happen in the future.

Depending on the additional cost, we might be seeing this as a standard feature in SIM cards in the future, although for those that extremely paranoid, this might be a scary thing, since you can always be tracked. We can imagine that the mobile network operators could also use this to try to send targeted SMS advertising to its customers, which could become a new blight of spam in the future.

More details here