As Rich highlighted Blister Entertainment earlier this week regarding their agreement with Sprint for LBS game distribution on Sprint’s Nextel network, some of you may have noticed this release from Moco News:

The Eurotechnology newsletter has reported that Japan’s Internal and Communications Ministry is planning to change regulations to require GPS in all mobile phones from April 2007 in Japan. Apparently the plans have been known for a while and the accuracy will be in the order of 15 meters. The newsletter doesn’t give a reason for the requirement but does talk about the fact that half of Japan’s 9 million emergency calls come from mobile phones – draw your own conclusions.

The interesting part (from a content perspective) is the knowledge developers have that all phones sold from a particular point will include GPS technology, which can be said of almost nothing else.

Here in the US market, despite the E911 mandate, and the developing Java JSR-179 spec, when will we have the knowledge that phones/carriers will support and make available GPS? Everyone agrees that making mobile apps more “context” aware is important for creating a valuable app, so how long will we have to wait?