More and more, a lot of services for which we used to pay premium are becoming free. One such service is satellite navigation, commonly known as Sat Nav or GPS. You can buy a standalone device or have it integrated on your mobile phone or even laptop. There are many brands from where you can chose, like TomTom, Garmin, Nuvii, CoPilot and so many others, and each will sell you maps for a specific region plus the ability to receive turn by turn navigation instructions, speed camera positioning warnings, speed limits and even where you can find the next ATM machine.
More recently, with the mass adoption of mobile Internet access, Google introduced a turn by turn feature to their popular Google Maps, even though this feature is only available in North America, but you would obviously be paying for traffic, as the maps are being downloaded from the cloud. You also need a good connection, so that the refreshing of the maps and loading of new areas takes place in a timely manner. For these reasons and the fact that mobile Internet is still pretty expensive in most places, Google Maps with turn by turn navigation didn’t pose that much of a threat to Sat Nav makers. But that is about to change!
It seems that Google is about to add an offline mode to Google Maps Navigation, allowing the user to cache the maps while within reach of a wireless connection, and then used the cached maps to navigate without the use of the Internet connection on the phone. And it also seems this will be free!!! TomTom, Garmin and company will feel this as a thorn on their side. True, Ovi Maps from Nokia already provided a similar service, but it never really took off, which seems to be a different story whenever Google is involved.
What about us, the consumers? Will this be a benefit to the user or will it provide a less sophisticated product inundating us with ads? What is your take? Is free really free?
Turn by Turn TTS(text-to-speech) Google Nav has been available in the UK for over a year at least, ive been using it and in my opinion its every bit as good as CoPilot.
ReplyDeleteYes, it has, even though only on Android. We'll see if it becomes available on other platforms (read iOS) soon, along with offline mode.
ReplyDeleteIts a good bit of software for Google though, and free, not sure if they'd be willing to give it to competitors, would be like RIM giving BBM to competitors... will have to see though..
ReplyDelete