While GPS chips have often done a great job of telling people where they are, they haven't been always accurate inside buildings or even out on the street. Broadcom (News - Alert) has just rolled out a chip that looks to change that, and make a user's cell phone always cognizant of its own – and by extent, its user's –location, no matter where that is, and to an incredible degree of accuracy.

Broadcom's new smartphone chip is said to be able to accurately determine its own location to within a few centimeters of its actual physical location – vertically, horizontally, indoors or out – and can even tell things like what floor of a building on which it's currently located by means of air pressure detection. The chip can interface with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in order to triangulate its position, by which it can determine the physical location of a Wi-Fi hotspot or a so-called Bluetooth beacon, which aren't in wide use, and then determine its own location relative to those beacons, much like older oceangoing vessels used stars.

This in turn has posed a variety of challenges for those devices, including battery management in the face of necessarily increased power usage to, at all times, allow the phone to track its own location, and the fact that the phone presupposes technology that isn't in wide use in the Bluetooth beacons. There are also serious perception problems for the phone, with privacy advocates declaring it little more than a tracking device for regular people, and several others declaring it the "de facto Mark of the Beast", in reference to the Biblical prophecies about the end of the world.

Still, for marketers, such a device would be valuable, as it would not only offer improved navigation in brick-and-mortar stores – users could check their phones to not only discover where they are in a store, but where what they want to buy is in relation to them – but also be able to offer special discounts and electronic coupons from the moment they walk in. Imagine a storefront in which a user can walk in, ask his or her phone where the motor oil is, then be not only shown where it is in the store but given a dollar off every bottle of Quaker State.

Then, that information can be processed and used to improve store layouts. When it's discovered most people come to the store for milk and toilet paper, these things can be put in the rear of the store, thus requiring customers to walk past everything else they may not have known was there previously.

While there are significant implications – for both good and ill – involved with most any technology, this particular brand will likely serve to be some of the most polarizing released yet. It will remain to be seen just how it is ultimately used.