TomTom has refreshed its Navigation App for iPhone and iPad with a new user interface, Foursquare integration and constantly updated maps. It'll also automatically check into your favorite hangouts to avoid forgetting to oust your frenemies at your local coffee house. The revised application will also help you avoid French speed traps that don't fall foul of new laws on traffic alerts, with the whole thing playing very nice with the recently announced car kit. The app retails for €70 ($87) in the App Store -- although we're not sure how popular it's going to be if those same features will be bundled in iOS 6.

Continue reading TomTom refreshes Navigation app for iOS, adds social features

Filed under: Cellphones, GPS

TomTom refreshes Navigation app for iOS, adds social features originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We know that iOS 6 will bless iPhone users with some in-house-made mapping, but that hasn't stopped Telenav from bettering its own Scout navigation offering for Apple's favorite handsets. Scout now does offline navigation by letting users download maps of the west, central or eastern United States over WiFi only. Plus, Scout now takes voice commands, so on your next road trip you can tell it to find the nearest Whataburger whether you have cell signal or not. Interested parties can head on over to the App Store to get their download on, but you'll pay for the privilege -- offline navigation costs $9.99 a year or $2.99 a month, though the free, data-dependant version of Scout for iPhone still includes speech recognition. Still not sold? Perhaps the video after the break will persuade you.

Continue reading Telenav's Scout gives iOS users offline navigation in exchange for ten bucks

Filed under: GPS, Software

Telenav's Scout gives iOS users offline navigation in exchange for ten bucks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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According to a new research report by Berg Insight, global shipments of GPS-enabled GSM/WCDMA handsets increased almost 97 percent in 2010 to 295 million units. Growing at a CAGR of 28.8 percent, shipments are forecasted to reach 940 million units in 2015.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of mobile subscribers using a turn-by-turn navigation service or application on their handset grew 57 percent from H1-2009 to H1-2010 and reached 44 million worldwide.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan , 2010 North American Consumer Location-based Services (LBS) Market – The Wireless Carrier Opportunity, finds that the wireless carrier-generated segment of the North American consumer LBS market amounted to on-deck application software revenues of approximately $718 million in 2009 and forecasts this to reach $1.58 billion in 2015.

With cell phones increasingly becoming the nexus of the burgeoning markets for navigation and Location Based Services (LBS), the use of GPS technology in such platforms is set to explode during the coming years, according to iSuppli.

According to a new report from Berg Insight, mobile location-based service revenues in Europe are forecasted to grow from € 220 million in 2009 at a CAGR of 12 percent to reach € 420 million in 2015.

Mireo is a Croatian navigation company that was for the first time at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. They were presenting their navigation solution “Don’t Panic”; it calculates a route of 3,000 km in less than 2 seconds and gives you directions according to landmarks which lessens the risk of getting lost and coming into a panic.

On 21 January 2010, Nokia announced that it is to make turn-by-turn navigation free with its Ovi Maps offering. The research firm Canalys claims the move is a logical one for Nokia to take, especially in light of the recent launch of Google’s free navigation solution.

However, alanysts predict Nokia’s announcement will not be welcomed though by all its mobile operator partners.

Nokia makes walk and drive navigation free on its smartphones. Starting today, the company offers a new version of Ovi Maps that includes turn-by-turn navigation with voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries and 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world.

Mobiluck is a mobile service that allows users to find friends, places, and even people nearby with their smartphone. If you've got an account on Skype, AIM, or MSN for example, those friends can be included on the Mobiluck system, and their locations relative to yours will be shared and if they are nearby, what a great way to notify them.

When asked if importing of contacts is remainst strictly to chat clients, Oliver Chouraki, CEO of Mobiluck says, “Yes at the moment you can import your MSN and other chat client contacts and we are working on Facebook and Twitter.”

It is now official and will completely change the mobile and PND navigation market. Google announced Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 devices.

It comes with 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting, but unlike most navigation systems, the Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of the phone's internet connection, as Google claims.

The first phone to have Google Maps Navigation is Motorola’s Droid. It hits the U.S. market next week (Nov. 6th) for $199 on contract.

According to a new research report by the analyst firm Berg Insight, the number of mobile subscribers downloading navigation routes and turn-by-turn navigation instructions using their mobile handsets increased twofold from H1-2008 to H1-2009 and reached 28 million.

Until 2015, the subscriber base is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 33.7 percent to reach 160 million users worldwide.

VIDEO INTERVIEW: Biz-News.com interviewed Ann Meng, Marketing & Sales Manager of Menq International. She presented the company’s star product - mini GPS/GSM tracker with GPRS.

This tiny device shows directly map location on any mobile without installing any software and transmits the SMS message of longitude, latitude and location link to cell phone. It supports indoor orientation, single location reporting and continuous tracking. In case of emergency, help message with location is send to all preset phone numbers.

NOKIA WORLD 09. Nokia announced the launch of the new Nokia X6, the latest edition to the company’s Xseries touch-screen device portfolio.

This very slim (14mm) handset features stroke-sensitive, 3.2 inch 16:9 nHD widescreen, that enables to fit 20 shortcuts onto a home screen, 32GB internal memory, 5 megapixels with Carl-Zeiss optics and dual LED flash, built-in features to edit videos and show them on TV or online, GPS with Assisted GPS support, compass and Nokia Ovi Maps.

Nokia has finally launched the N900 – running on the new Maemo 5 latest company’s smartphone, which has evolved from Nokia's previous generation of internet tablets. “The open source, Linux-based Maemo software delivers a PC-like experience on a handset-sized device” says the company’s announcement.

Nokia N900 packs an ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor, up to 1GB of application memory and 3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL ES 2.0 support. The result is, as the company promises, “PC-like multitasking, allowing many applications to run simultaneously.”

More than a third of Russian consumers are interested in a smartphone-based navigation device - while nearly 63 per cent are willing to pay more than euro 4 per month for a vehicle tracking service based on a GPS-enabled smartphone.
These are among the findings of research by Frost & Sullivan which also showed that global positioning system (GPS)-enabled smartphone technology is gaining ground over traditional portable navigation devices (PND) in the Russian navigation and telematics market.

INTERVIEW: Location-based advertising (LBA) is still in its early stages - and has so far mostly been rolled out in European markets, including France, Romania and Germany.
Now TechnoCom has brought a mobile advertising and marketing content delivery platform to the US where it believes the opportunities are huge.
Smartphone.biz-news spoke to Janice Partyka, vice president of external affairs at TechnoCom, about its SpotOn GPS application and plans for combining location-aware advertising with navigation.

Worldwide consumer location-based services (LBS) subscribers and revenue are expected to more than double in 2009.
The growth is being driven by the higher availability of GPS-enabled phones, reduced prices and the appearance of application stores, according to Gartner.

The rapidly growing smartphone market is providing a much-needed boost for handset-based turn-by-turn navigation.
While PNDs and in-dash navigation device sales continue to suffer from the economic recession, the number of paying handset-based turn-by-turn navigation users will increase to 26 million by the end of 2010, according to ABI Research.

AmAze's free navigation and local search service is the winner of smartphone-biz.news' Product of the Year 2008 award.
With 41 per cent of the nominations, the turn-by-turn GPS program was the clear winner in a field that included Fring, mobile messaging service Nimbuzz and cellular fixed mobile convergence solution OnRelay MBX.

The big names of the mobile world occupied vast stands at MWC in Barcelona - but some of the most interesting and innovative products, applications and technologies came from start-ups.
Smartphone.biz-news has pulled together some of the enterprising newbies that are likely to make a big impact in the future, including video interviews and photos.

For a start-up like Wizi having Google launch a competing product might seem like the kiss of death. Not so with the Lisbon, Portugal-based developers who have welcomed the launch of Google's Latitude as a way of bringing attention to their instant location sharing application. The free mobile application allows you to share your location instantly by e-mail or SMS.

This year's Mobile World Congress is now underway and already there has been a flurry of announcements and launches from some of the big names lining up in Barcelona.
Vodafone has unveiled a raft of new mobiles, including its first own-branded consumer GPS phone - the Vodafone 835.

Filed under: Peripherals, Misc

It's not that hybrid GPS systems are all that new, it's just that most are working totally under the radar. Skyhook's hoping to get its rendition out in the open a tad more via a new partnership with Texas Instruments. The company's XPS hybrid positioning system is now cleared for integration within TI's NaviLink and WiLink mobile solutions, though there's no mention made of who all is drooling to get this into their phones. In short, Skyhook's XPS works by detecting WiFi hotspots, raw GPS readings and cellular IDs, and then comparing that information against a known database of geo-located points. In theory, this stuff could totally amp up the location abilities of most any handset, but in reality, we wouldn't be surprised to see it get swept away and forgotten just like the eerily similar announcement between Skyhook and Broadcom. Full release is after the break.

Continue reading Skyhook XPS integrates with TI's NaviLink and WiLink mobile solutions

Skyhook XPS integrates with TI's NaviLink and WiLink mobile solutions originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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