Update: Garmin Mobile
Sept 9th - More info available from the Gamrin Press Release and the hometown favorite newspaper for Garmin (Olathe Kansas, USA) from the Kansas City Star.
"Garmin Mobile exposes an entirely new group of consumers to turn-by-turn satellite navigation," said Gary Kelley, Garmin's vice president of marketing. "We are thrilled that Sprint Nextel, an industry leader in voice and data communications, has chosen Garmin to provide these exciting new applications and location-based services to their customers."
"Garmin Mobile also is the first server-based navigation application that shows a user's position on a map, updating that position as he or she drives or walks, according to the company.
The second Sprint navigation program, TeleNav, is similar to a program Nextel has been offering on some phones for more than a year. TeleNav also gives turn-by-turn audio directions, but offers a large arrow instead of a map view to tell drivers where to turn.
Like Garmin Mobile, Santa Clara, Calif.-based TeleNav offers to locate nearby restaurants and businesses, and also has a feature showing the nearest low-priced gas.
An informal field test of the two services showed both strengths and weaknesses.
TeleNav tends to find a route faster than Garmin Mobile, but TeleNav's visual and audio interfaces aren't as user-friendly. The gas station feature didn’t appear to be always accurate.
Both programs worked well when asked to calculate a route, and when they announced an upcoming turn. The Garmin audio was decidedly better than that offered by TeleNav.
But neither program worked well when a driver missed a turn. TeleNav didn't spot errors for several blocks, then offered a new route. Garmin Mobile spotted errant turns even more slowly before offering a new route."
Finally Cingular is planning to launch GPS phones soon, including a pocket PC based PIM that uses the TomTom navigation interface.
So What?
Looks like things are going to get crowded with Cingular and Sprint matching NexTel's service. Things will move fast in this market, and these players don't like being caught behind for long. So I want to know when do I get SpongeBob, Snoop Dogg or Billy Joe from Green Day giving me personalized animated direction sets to the local bar?
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Original Post follows:
Garmin is moving into the phone market by providing the service that helps you navigate with your GPS enabled phone. They are doing this through Sprint PCS Vision phones (for now) with 3 Sanyo phones. The service is an easy to use software application that lets compatible mobile phones (in the US) funciton as GPS navigation devices. Want to go to restaurants, addresses, ATM's? Bring up the Point of Interest, get directions and be able to directly dial the phone number of that restaurant to make reservations.
The service is $9.99/ month, which gives you voice prompted turn by turn directions with moving maps, and access to 6 million points of interest (food, gas stations, airports, etc). They appear ot be offering a Garmin mobile Lite version coming soon. The technology relies on Navteq maps.
This will be interesting as people new to GPS are going to figure out that a small screen that is only backlit for 30 seconds at a time is too hard to see while driving 40 MPH down the road. The voice commands will be important, and right on the Garmin site, they offer windshield mounted holders for the mobile phones so that the phones can still get GPS reception while driving...... It's a wide open world for how GPS can help us. It's not just for Geocaching anymore.
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Read More in: GPS News | Garmin GPS News | Mobile Phone GPS | TomTom GPS News
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Posted by Scott Martin at September 9, 2005 6:18 PM
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