Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry. In the coming weeks look for columns from Current Analysis’ Peter Jarich, NPD Group’s Ross Rubin and Enderle Group’s Rob Enderle.
The most visible manifestation of mobile communications — the cellphone — has, in recent years, emerged as the singular laboratory for testing the limits of technological convergence. Driven by digitization, and aided by advances in processing and display technologies, as well as improvements in miniaturization and memory, the cellphone has increasingly appropriated the key attributes of many useful consumer devices, from music players and radios to digital cameras and television, to emerge as the mobile device of choice. Another consumer electronics device that, in recent times, has seen its quintessential value being appropriated by the mobile phone is the personal navigation device, or the PND.
The advent of location-based services, anchored in mapping and navigation data, points to the fact that mobile devices will play an increasingly important role in personal navigation space, including pedestrian navigation. One indicator of the rising salience of personal navigation to mobile phones is the fact that Nokia, the world’s largest mobile device vendor, after having acquired gate5, a supplier of mapping, routing and navigation software and services, is willing to cough up $8.1 billion for Navteq, the world’s leading provider of digital maps.
Garmin’s play
Are PND players going to be hapless bystanders waiting to be steamrolled by the mobile-phone juggernaut? Garmin, a leading manufacturer of personal navigation devices, recently signaled that such a deterministic view of the future may be uncalled-for. On January 30, the Kansas vendor announced that it was going to extend its flagship nuvi PND series product into the world of mobile telephony with the nuviphone, a sleek touchscreen device that would augment navigation functions with 3G wireless telephony and web-browsing.
Garmin’s n
