An interesting eWeek story on how navigation will be the next technology taken into the mass market by phones and smartphones. Should the likes of TomTom and Navtec be getting worried? (via S-F)
Read on in the full article.
Navigation to fall to the all conquering smartphone?
If phones do start including GPS chips and access to maps as standard (and there's no technical reason why not), it would completely change the way people use sat nav. It wouldn't just be for drivers and technology enthusiasts any more, locating the nearest station or restaurant could be done as casually as making a call.
The march of the phone into our lives continues...
The march of the phone into our lives continues...
At least we'll know where in our lives it's marching to...
I definately think navigation could be the next big thing.
What I invision is something like this. When being invited to a wedding instead of getting that tiny map in the invititation that no one understands wouldn't it be great if everyone just recieved an sms of the coordinates. Then our phones would tell us how to find the hall.
Natanlevine, that would definitely be a potentially huge application and it's almost certainly already possible if software makers wanted to support it.
Another really useful feature would be an "I'm here" button, so if you want to meet up with a friend you could press the button and their phone would show exactly where you are. That would also greatly help if you order a taxi, the driver would know just where to pick you up.
The thing about phones - is they are still not quite there yet.
If I could do everything on my phone I can do on my desktop PC, that's really the kind of phone I want. But it might be another 10 years before we get that far - and by then this technology will seem pretty lame too.