Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Wednesday, May 23, 2007
The state of mobile phones for navigation in the US
Cell Phones That Tell You Where to Go reflects where the US market is right now in this quickly emerging segment.
A misconception: 'The primary difference between navigation services on mobile phones and dedicated GPS devices designed for use in automobiles ... is that phones must pull maps and other data from servers over the carrier's network, while GPS devices store this information locally on a drive or a flash memory card.'
That's just how it's done right now. Phones could very well hold complete city maps etc. As they anyway need a lot of memory for music and videos (soon in the gigabytes), they can as well use that storage for maps, landmarks etc.
An interesting new service type (yet similar to earlier hyped 'Friend Finder' solutions): 'Conversely, some new GPS phone services don't involve navigation: Boost's Loopt, for example, lets you keep track of buddies who also use the service (and vice versa). That's something no car-navigation system you can find will do.'
A misconception: 'The primary difference between navigation services on mobile phones and dedicated GPS devices designed for use in automobiles ... is that phones must pull maps and other data from servers over the carrier's network, while GPS devices store this information locally on a drive or a flash memory card.'
That's just how it's done right now. Phones could very well hold complete city maps etc. As they anyway need a lot of memory for music and videos (soon in the gigabytes), they can as well use that storage for maps, landmarks etc.
An interesting new service type (yet similar to earlier hyped 'Friend Finder' solutions): 'Conversely, some new GPS phone services don't involve navigation: Boost's Loopt, for example, lets you keep track of buddies who also use the service (and vice versa). That's something no car-navigation system you can find will do.'
