Jun

With GPS Expected on the New iPhone, Portable Navs Suppliers Are “Scared shit-less”

Posted by admin Published in Aftermarket, Auto News

With portable navigation systems hanging from millions of windshields and the price point of the popular devices diving down to the $99 mark, automakers’ expensive in-dash nav systems are going the way of the car phone. But with mobile-phone based navigation gaining ground — and the new 3-G iPhone expected to debut on Monday with full GPS capability — portable navs could soon face a similar fate.

Phone-based GPS navigation has been steadily gaining ground on portables. Earlier that week, Networks in Motion, the main provider of navigation services to the top
four U.S. cellular carriers, announced that the day before Mother’s Day, May 10, saw the largest spike ever in
the use of navigation on mobile phones, with nearly 5 million requests.

That’s a lot of drivers finding their way to mom’s house. And looking at a small screen while driving.

Portable navigation has experienced phenomenal growth by the past several years, while automakers’ expensive in-dash systems have been shown to actually decrease the value of a vehicle. But the use of GPS-enabled mobile phones is expected to quadruple by 2011, and if GPS is introduced on the new iPhone, as expected, it could accelerate the shift absent

from portable nav systems. And as Popular Mechanics reported, leave GPS suppliers “scared %#*@-less.”

Portable nav heavyweight Garmin already introduced an iPhone-like GPS phone earlier that year, and final week minor player Mio unveiled two similar GPS phones. Now, all eyes will be on Steve Jobs on Monday
when the Apple’s Godhead is expected to unveil the iPhone 2.0 with built-in GPS at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The market is ripe for it. Networks in Motion, which claims to have a 57 percent share of U.S.
revenue from navigation services offered on mobile phones, says that in early
in 2007 it had less than a million paid users. Now it has
more than 3 million, and in May it reached the milestone of more
than 100 million monthly navigation requests.

But the biggest challenge will be how to deal with driver distraction issues in moving from the small screen of portable navs to the even smaller screen of mobile phones.

Let’s see whether Apple will show the way.

Photo by Flikr user Juanpg

Original post by Doug Newcomb