Posts tagged GPS devices

Have you made the switch from a dedicated GPS device to using GPS navigation on your smartphone?

This morning, the New York Times reported that smartphones are ‘beginning to displace’ standalone GPS devices as a more convenient way to get GPS navigation. The paper cited a recent report from Compete which asserted that more than 40 percent of all smartphone users are using GPS turn-by-turn on their device (for iPhone users its up to 80 percent!). The article also noted that sales of traditional GPS units have fallen sharply recently. (UPDATE: we are looking for the original Compete study but this may also include mapping services without turn-by-turn navigation)

Separately, Gartner published a report this week stating that the number of location-based services (LBS) subscribers will double in 2009 to reach nearly 96 million by the end of the year.

It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that we have always been believers of the potential of GPS navigation and other location-based services on phones – this was the vision of our founders when they started the company nearly 10 years ago. TeleNav services have been popular on BlackBerry smartphones for awhile but new smartphones, like the Sprint Palm Pre and the iPhone have also made a big difference. With large touch screens, these devices are very similar in size to many standalone GPS devices and can provide very nice and easy-to-follow on-screen mapping. (We’ve come a long way from the earliest versions of our service – check out this YouTube video one of our founders recently posted of TeleNav GPS Navigator v. 1.2 from 2002.)

I read a lot of comments from our customers over Twitter or on this blog that they have made the switch from standalone GPS devices to using our GPS navigation on their smartphone. What about you? Are you one of the 40 percent? Why or why not?