Wayfinder finally dies a cold Swedish death...

i wonder how this will affect those of us with N810's who paid for turn by turn navigation? will those contracts be honoured or will there be refunds or will we just get screwed again?

Hi Steve.

Firstly, hope I've done this right? I'm brand new to the forum and was passed this link and article by a friend.

I am part of a small group organising a petition to get Vodafone to listen to us as blind people. When they said they were discontinuing Wayfinder, they also discontinued Wayfinder Access which is the accessible version of the product for blind people.

The product is at least three times cheaper than any of the other GPS solutions for blind people out there and works in countries such as India, where no other Accessible GPS system is available.

Could I encourage anyone who is interested to go to:
www.talknav.com/protest

...And sign and even leave a comment on our page?

We do intend to meet with Vodafone to explore various options such as them giving us the rights to further develop Wayfinder Access ourselves.

I completely understand that my sighted fellow man (and woman) who have Wayfinder Navigator are being just as left in the dark as we are but, you at least do have other choices, which seem to be free at this stage.

It is worth me pointing out too that Vodafone 360 (which will include GPS functionality), is completely inaccessible to the blind comunity as are Nokia maps and Google maps.

Vodafone have only said so far that they are not switching off Wayfinder Access and have been silent about anything else...

Personally, I think they have left it on to save embarrasing questions over being caught out under the Disability Descrimination Act.

...So, please do feel free to go over and take a look at our petition; sign and comment.

Thanks all for reading and I look forward to hearing further comments.

Feel free to ask questions too.

Paul H (Vipodcasting)

Paul H - interesting comment - and something I would not have given any thought to. I can appreciate how important this must be for some people. I'm going to try passing this on via a few Vodafone contacts. I would hope they'll see your messages and something can be arranged for continuing access for those who need it.

Wayfinder announced a few weeks agoo that they were discontinuing the version for the Internet tablets. My licence runs for another 18 months and will continue to unless I need to relicence i, then I am screwed.

We have been screwed anyway as there have been no map updates since the start of 2008 and the traffic and speed camera services which worked well have not worked for over a year.

It's a massive shame, as running wayfinder on my N810 is better, and more accurate than a brand new garfmin with a cleaner interface. It would be great if the app and maps could be freed up, or if some way could be found to extract maps from openstreetmap in wayfinder binary format.

@unregistered ... yes i agree ... even tho i have an htc desire coming real soon now i wanted to keep my N810 as a gps and ebook reader and skype handset and the lack of map updates is a really poor show from wayfinder (who were a horrible company to deal with anyways so they got some karma back at them at least)

maep is a really useful app that *might* become something better if it was developed more

Hi Rafe.

Thanks for your concern.

If you do have suggestions or contacts with Vodafone, could I ask that you go to the petition sight and make contact with us over there?

I ask because we are trying to come at Vodafone with one voice which is partly the reason for the petition.

The more contacts we do have at Vodafone the better as we do have some suggestions as to ways forward for them and would certainly like to get some influencial heads around an oak table..

I don't know how it works with Wayfinder Navigator and such but, Wayfinder Access (the blind friendly version) came with a lifetime contract for it's users so, Vodafone really have to do something.

...And please, anyone reading this who is interested to know more about our petition; to sign and comment, it's at:
www.talknav.com/protest

That's where you will find all the contacts you need for us Rafe.

Thanks again all.

Paul H