Almost every mobile phone on the market uses GPS to check your physical location. There is a good reason for this too, it's because its the most accurate method of your finding your location.

However, there is a problem because you don't always have a GPS signal, which means applications such as navigation software take a very long time to find your location or don't even work at all.

Blackberry mobiles have historically been no different and have used GPS as the exclusive way to find users locations. However, they've now added another method to assist in working out where you are.

Users running a BlackBerry Mobile using Application Platform 5 can now find their location when they don't have a GPS signal using a new "Location Service" which determines location using nearby mobile base stations. This method isn't as accurate as GPS, but it is quicker and doesn't require a GPS signal.

As well as providing locations to applications when no GPS signal is present , Blackberry hope the function will be combined with GPS to improve user experiences. For example GPS can be slow to load in details to navigation applications so the new method could be used to display an overview while the GPS data is gathered.

We think it's a nice idea from Blackberry that will no doubt prove useful to all users, but especially those in bad signal areas.