I personally enjoyed very much the iPhone 3GS presentation when TomTom Inc. presented their software/hardware add-ons that will allow you to use the iPhone as fully functional Navigation System. The question is how long companies like Garmin can sit monopolizing the market and provide little more than radical incrementalism in it’s new product offerings. About a year ago there were four competitors in the personal navigation market: Garmin, TomTom and Navigon with Magellan kind of in the background. Navigon has ended it’s production of devices but will sell it’s software to anyone willing to license it. Magellan is still creeping around, but has been superceeded by Garmin long ago. So TomTom and Garmin beat each others heads in on a quarterly basis. TomTom really did innovate in the software end of things providing all kinds of aids like telling you which road lane to take on the highway, or help at difficult intersections. As they rolled these out, Garmin would just sit back and eventually respond with a similar feature. Slowly by attrition trying to bleed away the advantage of TomTom. Worse yet, Garmin entered into a project to design a brand new cell phone with all the software and gps components integrated into it. THAT folks is the Garmin strategy. They will own the production of the device and the software or nothing at all. TomTom has taken a rather different approach and is kind of taking a cue from Navigon. They took the Apple iPhone Application development environment and ported the software into it. Now the GPS chip of the iPhone can be fully accessed and used to turn the iPhone into a TomTom Go!
Oh how I wish Garmin had seen this coming. Worse yet, they will not adapt their strategy. It’s full steam ahead on the cell phone and they are sticking to it. Ericsson is helping them design it, and it won’t be out for another year. Which shows the perilous position they are in. With the blistering pace of product introductions in the Navigation market, wouldn’t Garmin have learned that a 2 year design cycle on a cell phone is going to KILL the product once it’s released? And worse yet, as the tastes change, who is going to give up their iPhone just to have the privilege of owning the Garmin branded cell phone. I swear that product is dead on arrival and Garmin needs to pay off it’s contract with Ericsson and bury all the prototypes built so far. End it, end it now.
“It’s more like a desperate move. Now that you have the iPhone and the Pre, it’s just too late,” Mr. Blin said. Smartphones equipped with GPS “are the model moving forward that is going to be successful.”
Toshiba currently bonds several traditional flash chips into a multi-chip stacked package. The Apple iPhone 3GS is an example of one manufacturer using this seemingly cutting edge technology. In one chip Toshiba has achieved 32GBytes of storage. But size is always a consideration for portable devices like cell phones. So how do you continue increasing the storage without making the chip too thick?
Enter the nirvana of 3D CMOS manufacturing. SanDisk and Toshiba both have aquired companies who dabbled in the 3D chip area. And I’m not talking multi-chip modules, stacked on on top of another in a really thin profile. These would be laid down one metallic layer at a time in the manufacture process, achieving the thinnest profile theoretically possible. So if you are like me and amazed that 32GBytes of Flash can fit in one chip, just wait. The densities are going to improve even more. But it’s going to be a few years into the future. Three years of development and research is going to be needed to make the 3D Flash chip a manufacturable product.
The basic idea is to stack layers of flash memory atop one another to build a higher capacity chip more cheaply than by integrating the same number of cells into a single layer chip. The stacked chip would also occupy a smaller area than a single layer chip with the same capacity.
The answer to the question in this picture to the left is a resounding NO! All bets are being placed on Apple using a custom processor for it’s version of a Tablet PC. This is interesting in that everyone in the Technology Computer Gizmo/Gadget news circles has pursued this as a story starting last week.
China Times Daily apparently is hinting a new Mac Tablet is being manufactured for release in October of this year. I’m surprised they decided to go with a custom processor for the tablet. But given the ultra-competitiveness of the Wintel netbook market, CPUs are the next big thing in product differentiation. There are manufacturers now using Google’s Android cell phone OS paired with cell phone processors from ARM and Motorola for a new generation of battery conserving netbooks. Most of those products are targeted at the Pacific Rim market and will never see the American market at all. Which made me sad because I would love to have a netbook with extra long battery run times.
I have adapted much of my computer needs to what can be delivered through a network, web-browser and web apps. So the netbook to me is a nice analog to a cell phone and I’ve been waiting to jump into the market until some bigger innovations occured. Maybe this product will help shift the market the way the iPhone has done for cell phones. And with their new found CPU designs maybe product differentiation will even be easier.
However, hairy eyeball of experience rears it’s ugly head and takes the shine of this buzzing hive of technology press bees. Enter Mark Sigal @ O’Reilly.com. Mark doesn’t think the tablet is the real story, but that the iPod Touch IS the Mac Tablet right here, right now. Given Mark Sigal’s earlier survey of the mobile computing landscape he proposes a unified matrix of Apple computing products rather than phone vs. computer. So the longer one waits, the less we have to worry about whether we should be buying a Tablet or an iPhone. Personally I think the bigger screen and the new CPU from PA-Semi does warrant some extra attention. I think we’re going to see either longer battery run times, or maybe mix of iApps and iLife and iWork on the same happy device. But, who knows? We all have to wait until October.
The VentureBeat note says that Apple divided the PA-Semi designers between two projects: ARM-based mobile phone processors on the one hand and a tablet processor, possibly ARM-based as well, on the other.
So we are looking at an Apple CPU-powered Mac tablet with touchscreen functionality and an October launch. The timing is said to be suitable for sales in the lead up to Christmas. Neither the manufacturers nor Apple are saying anything.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 