ISRO and Oppo join hands to bring NavIC messaging service: Details here

ISRO and Oppo have signed a deal for bringing a messaging service based on India's NavIC. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO),has signed an MoU with Oppo India for working on the research and development of the NavIC messaging service, which aims to provide a user-friendly platform. Oppo will use this NavIC based messaging service in its future phones sold in India.

“This MoU will pave the way for future collaborations between ISRO and OPPO India to develop indigenous solutions by incorporating the NavIC short messaging feature in the smartphones released by Oppo India,” says Oppo India in a press note. The MoU is said to enable an exchange technical information related to the NavIC messaging services between Oppo and ISRO.

ISRO and Oppo to work on NavIC messaging

Oppo says that with this collaboration, they can build rapid, ready to use, end to end application-specific solutions by integrating NavIC messaging service with its mobile handset platform. The specifics of how this technology is going to help Indian users isn't out yet.

NavIC is India's equivalent of the American GPS system. The NavIC system provides regional navigation services covering the Indian mainland. It also covers an area up to 1500 kms beyond the Indian mainland. Other than location services, the NavIC technology is also capable of broadcasting short messages, or popularly known as SOS. This is mainly used for broadcasting safety-of-life alerts in areas where there is poor or no communication system available.

It remains to be seen how Oppo make use of this technology in its smartphones to enhance the messaging service. Oppo phones currently rely on GPS and Beidou global positioning services, which is why ISRO ahs urged the company to include NavIC navigation on their phones in the future.

Currently, Xiaomi is the only company to have used the NavIC navigation support on its phones. The Redmi Note 9 series and the Redmi Note 10 Lite support NavIC navigation out of the box.