Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve probably heard a lot of talk about the HTC Hero on Sprint. With the number of mobile phones that come out each year, it seems like only a few phones generate significant buzz before they launch and the Hero is one of those phones. Sprint launched the Hero yesterday and you guessed it, Sprint Navigation (powered by TeleNav) is available on the phone.
I got my hands on the Hero prior to the launch and took it for a spin and I have to say, I was really impressed with the phone’s performance and overall look and feel. While I was giving the phone a test drive, I decided to shoot this brief video of Sprint Navigation guiding me around here in Sunnyvale. As you can see, the app looks great on the phone and got me exactly where I wanted to go.
In the video you’ll see me using and mentioning a number of features built into Sprint Navigation including a POI search to find the bank I was navigating too. I also mention some of the other categories available in the more than 10 million POIs including gas by price, air ports and Wi-Fi hotspots. I also used the app in landscape mode and decided to try and throw it off by missing some turns to show how quickly it was able to calculate a new route and get me heading in the right direction.
I hope you enjoy this brief video and if you’ve already picked up a new Hero or are planning to, be sure to check out Sprint Navigation. And when you do, don’t hesitate to tell us what you think.
Thanks to everyone who participated in our anniversary celebration by entering our Pay it Forward Anniversary contest. Below is the list of winners. They each will receive two free subscriptions of TeleNav GPS Navigator for one year - one for them and one for their lucky friend! We’ll reach out to the winners via email with information on claiming the prize.
For the rest of you, we will run more contests soon so please stay tuned here for another chance!
Some of you may have seen the rumors floating around lately regarding the applications that will come preloaded on Motorola’s upcoming CLIQ phone, the company’s first Android device running on T-Mobile’s network. Well, today T-Mobile officially announced details surrounding the CLIQ, including the preloaded applications and the date you can preorder this very cool device. We’re happy to say that TeleNav GPS Navigator v5.5 will be one of the applications CLIQ owners will be able to fire up from the first day they get their hands on the device. The service will come with a free two-week trial so CLIQ users can try the application out first hand. After that, users can get turn-by-turn directions, real-time traffic information, more than 10 million points of interest and spoken address entry capabilities for $9.99/mo.
You can preorder the CLIQ starting Oct. 19 and it will be available in stores on Nov. 2, right in time for the holiday season. To give you a little taste of TeleNav GPS Navigator v5.5 running on the CLIQ, we took the phone out for a little drive around our headquarters here in Sunnyvale. As you’ll see in the video, the application for the CLIQ got us right to where we needed to go and did it in style, with cool features such as flipping to landscape mode when the physical keyboard slides out.
All of you T-Mobile subscribers be sure to check out the CLIQ and all of the preloaded apps including our TeleNav GPS Navigator v5.5. You won’t be disappointed.
Samsung and Sprint are partnering to bring the new Samsung Instinct HD phone to you this Sunday, Sept. 27. As you can see in the video, I had a chance to play with the phone for a few days and I’ll tell you that there’s something really sexy about this little device. The Instinct HD felt really solid as a piece of hardware and the touchscreen has a nice response and tactile feel to it, which kept me from ever guessing if the phone recorded my touch or not.
I decided to hop in my trusty Corolla S (Toyota, you can address the check to me) which is now becoming famous on our YouTube channel thanks to previous demos. For this trip, I decided to head to a local Bank of America branch and as you can see, Sprint Navigation (powered by TeleNav) on the new Samsung Instinct HD got me there without a hitch. What was most impressive to me was the speed at which the application fired up and had me on my way.
Some of the features you’ll see in the video demo include full text-to-speech with spoken street names, a POI search (from the more than 10 million that are included with the app), and you’ll hear the application search for traffic congestion along our route. Fortunately in this demo I didn’t run into any traffic issues, which for the Bay Area, is pretty rare.
Enjoy the video and check out the Samsung Instinct HD on Sprint, it’s definitely the type of phone that will make your friends jealous. And who among us doesn’t enjoy doing that.
Time is ticking away for you to win one of the biggest prizes we’ve ever given away here on the TeleNav Blog. You only have four days left to enter to win a full year of TeleNav service for you and a friend. The season of giving is quickly approaching, so why not get a head start and hook one of your friends or family members up with GPS navigation on their mobile phone. Just think, they’ll never be able to blame getting lost as the reason they missed your wedding again.
So how do I enter you ask? It’s very easy. All you have to do is click on THIS LINK and visit the original contest post. Leave a comment as to why your friend deserves (or in most cases NEEDS) TeleNav’s GPS navigation application on their phone and we’ll select the best five entries. As I mentioned above, the winners get a year of service for themselves and the friend or family member they nominated. To all of you couples out there, this is your chance to finally end one of the arguments that has plagued humankind for centuries.
But wait, there’s more. As part of our extended 10 Year Anniversary Celebration, we thought it would be great to give readers of our blog an inside peek into what life is like inside the friendly confines of the TeleNav offices. So, we took some time to visit with employees in our Seattle and Sunnyvale offices to shoot a brief video and ask them a few questions about what it’s like being part of the TeleNav family. Oh, and keep an eye out for a special edition of “TeleNav Idol” with our own versions of Randy, Paula and Simon (we later had our own Ellen announce that she was replacing Paula). We hope you enjoy this short video on life at TeleNav and if you want to see more, you can view some fun pictures of BBQs, team outings and other events at TeleNav here. Now go enter that contest!
This week, we’re continuing to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. If you haven’t already entered to win a year of TeleNav GPS Navigator for you and a friend, don’t forget! You can enter by adding a comment on this blog post about why someone else should win. It’s that easy!
In the meantime, we thought we’d share with you a video of one of the very early versions of TeleNav GPS Navigator. This is from our first color version (remember when most phones where black and white??) from 2002. It’s on a Nextel i95 phone and you can see the difference in our service from only a few years ago and now. Awww…we were so young then….
The audio is not good in this video so mute your speakers before you press play.
We all know someone who seems to always be getting lost or arriving to events “fashionably late.” Well, here’s your chance to help that person out and give them the gift of GPS navigation right on their phone. Better yet, you don’t have to pay for the gift and you’ll even get it for yourself too! That’s right, we’re giving away a total of TEN (two for each winning entry) one-year subscriptions to TeleNav’s GPS navigation applications including TeleNav GPS Navigator and applications we develop for our carrier partners including AT&T Navigator, Alltel Navigation and Sprint Navigation. That means if your friend has an Apple iPhone, T-Mobile myTouch 3G or G1, BlackBerry or any of the hundreds of devices we support, you can hook them up.
It’s easy to submit as well. To enter to win, visit MONDAY’S BLOG POST and leave a comment explaining why your friend deserves to win one of the GPS navigation applications we develop. Full contest details are available for review in the post as well.
While you’re deciding which of your friends is most deserving of your generosity, here are a couple of fun mobile phone facts*. As you may know, TeleNav celebrated it’s 10th anniversary last week and we thought we’d show you how things have changed from the day our doors opened in 1999 to now. Enjoy!
Top Five Carriers in 1999 - AT&T, Vodaphone Airtouch, SBC Wireless, Bell Atlantic Mobile, Bell South Mobile Systems.
Top Five Carriers Today - Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Alltel
Total Wireless Subscribers in 1999 - 86 million
Total Wireless Subscribers Today - 270.3 million (entering 2009)
Total Wireless Revenues in 1999 - $40 billion
Total Wireless Revenues Today - $148 billion
Cell sites in the US in 1999 - 81,698
Cell sites in the US Today - 192,068
Average number of minutes used per month in 1999 - 242
Average number of minutes used per month in 2009 - 800
Average monthly mobile phone bill in 1999 - $41.24
Average monthly mobile phone bill in 2009 - $50.07 (at end of 2008)
Cleary times have changed in the past 10 years. Now, go enter that contest and scoop up some free GPS navigation service for yourself and a friend.
* Data referenced from Telephony Magazine, the FCC, CTIA, RCR Wireless, IE Market Research and JD Power.
I’m not sure how many of us who’ve now grown far beyond our childhood days can remember our 10th birthdays, but I’d bet that at the time, it was probably a big milestone for everyone. The first year you hit double digits, you had officially lived an entire decade and could now accurately make the statement “remember the 80’s (or 70’s, 60’s, you name it).” I’m sure my 10th birthday consisted of ice cream cake and a new Nintendo (yes, the original NES) game.
Well, this past Wednesday, on 09/09/09, TeleNav turned 10 years old and just like a little kid, we certainly see this as one of the major milestones in the history of the company. A few people have joked that in tech company years, we’re probably closer to 70 years old, but we’d like to think we still have the energy and passion of a young kid.
We celebrated internally with a great lunch and a chat with our CEO, HP Jin. HP talked about the early days of the company and recalled some of his first presentations that made reference to TeleNav having a strong team of 16 or 17 people. We now employ more than 800 people globally. Things have certainly changed in 10 years.
It was a great celebration and we all had a wonderful time, but we don’t want to keep the celebrating all to ourselves. We’re extending our birthday celebration into next week and will be posting videos (with cameos from some of your favorite tech journalists), interesting bits of information on the mobile industry and last but not least, one of the biggest contests we’ve had on our blog to date.
So, stay tuned and be sure to visit the blog often next week and join in our celebration of a great 10 years. We’re certainly excited for the next 10.
More than 50% of the students we asked said they hadn’t felt confident in their ability to find their way around their college town before heading to school their freshman year.
More than 60% said they were not familiar with the location of businesses or buildings (with more than 1/3rd of this group saying it took more than 3 mos. to figure it out)
More than 50% said they would not have been able to locate the police station in an emergency
More than 40% said they would not have been able to locate the nearest hospital
More than 40% said they got lost during their first year and 1/4 of these said it had caused them to fear for their safety
And don’t think that just because your kid is staying in-state means they know their way around. 45% of the students who said their school was within 200 miles of home still weren’t confident about driving around town.
If you think that your kid has a plan to get acclimated to their new college town, think again. The #1 way students said they found they way when they were lost? Waiting until they hit a landmark or other location that they recognized. The 2nd most popular (not so scientific) method was to depend on someone else in the car to lead the way.
So you ask them not to drink and drive, remind them not to text and drive, and just in general, encourage them to be safe drivers. But how do you ensure they are confident navigating their new stomping grounds?
James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, sat down with us for a few minutes to give us his best advice for parents. You can listen to the conversation here:
Give your kids some sort of GPS technology so they can find their way around, especially in emergency situations
Before or on moving day, take some time out to pinpoint the most important places and take a test drive with them
Put together a “lost” kit for your student’s car that includes a paper map, reference and emergency numbers, a prepaid mobile phone (or phone card) and a prepaid gas card
TeleNav is also offering a Back to School special for TeleNav GPS Navigator. From now through the end of September, parents can purchase a full year of the service for $89. Once activated, students can get GPS navigation directly from their cell phone. If you’re interested, visit our online store and use this promotion code: Back2School2009.
We were pretty excited to find out this week that TeleNav GPS Navigator has been nominated as the best GPS navigation app by the Android Network, a consortium of Android sites like AndroidGuys and Android and Me. Now it’s up to the voters to decide!
If you are a fan of our service on either the myTouch 3G or the G1, we’d appreciate your vote as we’re up against some great competition.
Just click on the icon below and look for “Best GPS Navigation App.” Voting ends on Sunday. Thanks for your vote!
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