Move Over GPS, Here Comes the Smartphone – NYTimes.com
Maybe these devices will converge into one
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.”
When I first read that so many cell phone manufacturers were incorporating GPS chips into their new model phones, I thought “Great!” But then I read in numerous articles that the Phone companies didn’t want anyone accessing the chips through software on the phone, because they couldn’t figure out a way to charge extra for it. Eventually they were able to do this with smartphones like the Treo and Blackberry. What a crock that was! So even if you had a GPS chip you couldn’t just load something on there and start using it, you had to buy something and pay ATT or Verizon extra in order to use it, essentially a subscription for the GPS chip on your phone.
So I say, yes you should be able to monkey around with the GPS on your phone. Why should any company have a monopoly over every little feature that’s built-in, or charge you extra for the privilege of accessing it?
[…] making a much more strategic choice by adopting an open platform: Google’s Android phone OS. I wrote about Garmin’s response to the coming Smartphone onslaught to it’s dominance of the GPS navigation market. This was […]
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 
Comments
3 responses to “Move Over GPS, Here Comes the Smartphone – NYTimes.com”
did you see this article over on slashdot yesterday?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/07/13/2148232/Tracking-a-Move-Via-Find-My-iPhone
just a stupid example, but why shouldn’t you be able to monkey around with internet related stuff with your GPS?
When I first read that so many cell phone manufacturers were incorporating GPS chips into their new model phones, I thought “Great!” But then I read in numerous articles that the Phone companies didn’t want anyone accessing the chips through software on the phone, because they couldn’t figure out a way to charge extra for it. Eventually they were able to do this with smartphones like the Treo and Blackberry. What a crock that was! So even if you had a GPS chip you couldn’t just load something on there and start using it, you had to buy something and pay ATT or Verizon extra in order to use it, essentially a subscription for the GPS chip on your phone.
So I say, yes you should be able to monkey around with the GPS on your phone. Why should any company have a monopoly over every little feature that’s built-in, or charge you extra for the privilege of accessing it?
[…] making a much more strategic choice by adopting an open platform: Google’s Android phone OS. I wrote about Garmin’s response to the coming Smartphone onslaught to it’s dominance of the GPS navigation market. This was […]