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From the latest issue of GPS World, the article on the GPS-Smartphone revolution ends with this interesting comment:
"Imagine every receiver ever made since GPS was created 30 years ago: military and civilian, smart-bomb, boat, plane, hiking, survey, precision farming, GIS, Bluetooth-puck, personal digital assistant, and PND. In the last three years, we have put more GPS chips into mobile phones than the cumulative number of all other GPS receivers that have been built, ever!"

They're talking here about somewhere around 500 million GPS chipsets in phones. The word revolution is over-used, but here it is appropriate and even an understatement, I think.

The article discusses the technologies that are enabling this "revolution":
http://www.gpsworld.com/wireless/the-smartphone-revolution-9183
and the feedback that those technologies, deployed in their hundreds of millions, are having on other GPS devices.

Of course, GPS sets in smartphones are not functioning as navigation tools in the literal sense. Their users are not "lost" without them. In the majority of cases, the GPS data is doing little more than saving the user from the trouble of fiding the nearest street signs and typing the address into Google. But there's something else here that does have navigational relevance. These hundreds of millions of consumer devices are now driving the market. They also guarantee millions of complaining voices if the system loses integrity or if jamming and spoofing become common. It should soon be possible to hunt down GPS jamming, if it is any real threat, just by searching the Internet for angry phone users complaining that their location-based services don't work in certain locations. Just a thought...

-FER