After years of producing the hottest of GPS devices, Garmin has seen the future. Garmin will be releasing their Nuviphone, their first mashup of their GPS technology and cell phones. It is finally ready, after months and months of effort in which they learned putting together a high quality smart phone is harder than it looks. The sad part is that it will not be available until the second quarter of 2009, maybe. While it is great that they are finally releasing the phone (maybe), they are going to miss the ultra important Christmas season. Also, their efforts to get out this phone may be completely wasted since it may not be as good as the iPhone or the G1 Google phone. The question is, does it really make sense to release this phone at all?

As a partial answer to this question, Garmin has said that they will be building an Android phone in the future. Garmin has learned the hard way that they want to be a hardware company. Let Google handle their software.

Of course, the best part for Garmin with going to Android is that they don’t need to try to develop a community of developers. They can just piggyback off the efforts of Google and they focus on their key GPS technology.

The geolocation market has been exploding as new, inexpensive tools and services are introduced. The company to watch in this area has been Google and its Google Maps products.

But this brings up another questions. What will become of the personal navigation devices (PND) like those from Garmin and TomTom? The question has been answered by ABI Research. The use of PND with their only or main function of helping users navigate is popular with the over 45 year old crowd. These users want a simple, easy-to-use device. The under 45 and especially the under 35 set is turning to their mobile devices to provide this functionality, among many others that it supplies.

The manufacturers of the one-trick pony devices like Garmin and TomTom will need to evolve to challenge the iPhones and Blackberries smartphones, their new competition. To survive, they will need to evolve quickly, before the under 35 crowd teaches the over 45 crowd how to use their new iPhones.

 Today at Macworld I spoke to RouteBuddy and Garmin about the idea of making a open source method to allow users to upload Geogad Mobile Tours and similar content to their GPS products and solutions.  Let’s hope that they are interested in a nice, simple open format as I discussed in my previous post.  It would make a killer app from their side and allow regular people (and Geogad, of course) to create and post their own tour content.  All in all, very Web 2.0. 

Today at Macworld, Steve Jobs finally put the rumors to rest.  Yes, Apple is introducing the much rumored iPhone.  Judging by today’s demo, it will be a hot device.  It is quite literally the merging of the iPod (music, video, and photo) with a phone with an Internet browser.  Just to review the basic features, it is a device with a single button that has a 3 1/2 inch touch sensitive hi-res screen.  It will only be available on Cingular (soon to be the rebranded AT&T, …it’s BACK) for $499 for a 4G model and $599 for a 8G model.  Both versions require a 2-year plan.  The iPhone will be available in the US in June, which will give everyone a chance to start saving their latte money to buy this new phone. 

From Geogad’s point of view, the new iPhone looks great.  Its large screen and iPod functionality will allow travelers to view and play their Geogad Mobile Tours as a selected playlist.  The iPhone will even allow the user to see the album art in each MP3 as if they were books in a bookshelf so the user can see what is coming up and what they have already listened to.  The Internet browser seems to be able to view regular web pages in vivid detail.  If so, then it may be possible to surf to the regular Geogad web pages without having to deal with the limited WAP-type pages.

On the downside, the Iphone was reported by CNET to not have 3G capabilities.  They create a multimedia phone with a low speed connection.  What are they thinking? Maybe they are planning to have the user handle high speed communications with WiFi.  Now we just need to roll out WiFi.

Another downside for Geogad is how to best support providing our content to mobile devices.  After all, the big mobile streaming standard were MP4 and Microsoft WMV and WMA.  The other major trend in mobile content is also one of the biggest.  Verizon and YouTube/Google are teaming up to offer limited YouTube downloadsvia Flashlite.  It seems that the future of mobile content standards are going to be determined by the big cell phone and content companies teaming up to offer their content flavor to their customers. 

Let’s just hope that they work among themselves to provide some interoperability.  It is still a messy, mobile world out there. 

Speaking of messy, how do you suppose that you keep the screen clean if you are always touching it.  Also, how do you protect the screen from scratches if you are always testing it.  iPod are great devices, but they are notorious for how easily they are damaged.  Will this be an issue with the iPhone?  After all, is there any standard portable electronic device that has to take as much punishment as a regular old cell phone?

Another downside is the pricing.  But given that Apple does not want to lower the margins on their iPods, they really could not have sold the iPhone at the standard pricing for smart phones in the $200-400 range.  After all, that is the price of the standard Video iPod now.  Since the iPhone is also a phone and Internet browser, it would have to be price at least $100 higher than the Video iPod while still below the important mental price point of $700.  After all, you are starting to get in the range of a good laptop computer at that point. 

iPhone, Real, Flash, Cingular, MacWorld, Garmin, RouteBuddy, open source, GPS, multimedia, Verizon, WiFi, Geogad

We are looking at the end of a fantastic and busy year.  2006 saw the start of Geogad, the offical launch of its website and the release of 5 different tours in 3 different cities.  2007 will be just as busy.  More tours in dozens of cities have been planned for the coming year.  The Geogad web site will see more features added to make it even more useful to travelers.  Just keep you eyes on Geogad for all the latest developments.

Part of looking into the future includes imagining what new things we would like to have.  The biggest wish on the Geogad wish list is for new functionality to be included in personal GPS systems. As GPS systems drop in price, they will become a bigger part of everyone’s lives.  It will be great when Geogad Mobile Tours can be seemlessly added to these units as part of a universal GPS tour.  The only problem with GPS systems now are their still high prices and their lack of standardization.  What the producers of GPS systems should do to increase their usefulness is to allow customers to quickly add third-party content, such as Geogad’s tours, using ax XLM-based open source standard in the spirit of RSS.  For example, a simple text file could list a route as a series of coordinates (as many GPS devies currently do).  But they can also include references to other media files, such as MP3 or video.  I envision the file looking something like

(rss:global tour) 

(header info about tour)

(body)

(point 1: lat, long)point1_section1.mp3, point1_section1.mp3, point1.mp4(/point1)

(point 2: lat, long)point2_section1.mp3, point2_section1.mp3, point2.mp4(/point2)

…..

(point x: lat, long)pointx_section1.mp3, end_of_tour.mp3, end_of_tour.mp4(/pointx)

(/rss: global tour)

The GPS system could read the text file to understand that it should play some intro MP3 file then used its satellite direction system to guide the user to the first coordinate within a +/- error distance.  The GPS unit could then play the specified series of MP3, MP4, or other media file.  At the end of all of these media files, the GPS unit could then play an ending media file.

Let’s get the word out to Garmin, TomTom, Magellan, Nokia, Mitac, Verizon, and all of the other players in the GPS systems space that getting these device to play nice with third-party apps and content will help speed GPS adoption and improve travelers’ lives.

GPS Universal GPS tour standard TomTom Garmin Nokia Verizon Magellan