There’s been a lot of OOOOOOH, WOOOOW, THIS WILL BE GREAT from the recent announcement from Google to provide Turn-by-Turn navigation within Google Maps. Many bloggers and news sites are saying it’s going to be the death of PND (Personal Navigation Devices) and AIO (All In One’s) as well as the death of GPS applications on platforms like Windows Mobile, Android and of course the iPhone.
Personally I don’t buy that, and here’s my personal take on this.
1. The cloud (the Internet) is not only a good thing but it’s a bad thing. Think about how many times you’ve tried to make a phone call and cannot, how many times your phone calls have been dropped, or you’ve tried to send a text message or do something on the Internet and cannot due to bad mobile phone coverage. The Internet as much as it is great is also a big hindrance when it comes to Internet on mobile phones. Picture this, you’re driving down the road, you need turn-by-turn navigation but suddenly you lose mobile phone coverage. You have no maps, there’s no where to pull over, you’re now completely stuck, all you can do is drive on probably miss a number of critical turns and get yourself really lost.
2. The Street View that Google show with an overlay of your route isn’t going to be how the navigation is going to look like whilst driving when they have this available. These are static images and will not be a continuous video. Google can of course show one image after another and update them as you are driving along. The other thing is if they were to use Street View continuously whilst driving it would become very dangerous. Just think if you’re driving down a road and suddenly you look at your device and see a car there and brake hard. Or even worse, you see there’s no car there and put your foot down and in reality you actually have a car in front of you. All of Street View have cars and people on the Street View, so this is potentially very dangerous and distracting. Ultimately the Street View will be to show you probably where to make a left or a right, but nothing more than this. Almost like a ClearTurn screen that you see in CoPilot Live v8.
3. Everyone are saying how good it would be to provide satellite image overlays like Google are suggesting like you can do on your desktop and plan a route. Although this is great on a PC, what use is it going to have whilst you’re on the road? 90% of people prefer to have their maps in 3D mode. Satellite images don’t scale well to move into the 3D plane because they’re flat, because they’re taken by something very high up in the sky. They don’t have any 3D dimension.
4. To use something like Google Maps (we call it off-board navigation) as the maps are not on-board on the device, they’re off-board on a server somewhere, you would need an unlimited data plan. Some Mobile Operators in various countries provide this, e.g. for iPhone, but you usually pay a premium for this in your monthly tariff. Most people don’t want to pay for data plans because they see it as something they should have for free. Very similar to the all inclusive 1500 minutes of talk time that people want for next to nothing.
5. Speed is another thing, the more data you need to send down to the device, the slower the connection will be. What if you make 3 wrong turns because you’re in heavy traffic, in the wrong lane and following the flow of the traffic. Many off-board systems aren’t quick enough to keep up with this and don’t cache a radius around you. If they do, then you will be downloading a lot more data than you should and ultimately if you don’t have an unlimited data plan then it could cost you dearly.
6. Google have suggested that they will be offering their navigation software for free. Ultimately what we as navigation consumers will see is a move between pay for product to a free model with reduced feature sets. You’ll see advertising included on the map screens become distracting whilst you drive if they’re not implemented properly and nag screens appear when you drive past a McDonalds or Starbucks asking you to pull over and buy their products. This will be the downside to a free system. After all nothing in life is for free, and if you look at Google’s current model it’s all advertising based. They don’t charge you for their applications but do put adverts in all of their software. Take a close look at Gmail for instance, whenever you read an email no matter who it’s from they try to provide a customised advert on-screen by looking at the words and phrases contained in the email. So long term in the next 3 or 4 years you might find that you don’t have to pay for a navigation application as you can download a free version but ultimately you will be paying for it in terms of continuous adverts appearing on-screen or having to pay to upgrade to additional feature sets that you probably already have for free in the base product that you have now.
Ultimately if you don’t have any mobile phone coverage you won’t have any maps or any turn-by-turn navigation.
There’s also more than enough room in the Mobile Navigation Market to have Google and other companies compete side by side. What we will find is a lot more innovation, feature sets and different kind of implementations. Ultimately this will probably be good for everyone.
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