Same day, same hemisphere - different fortunes:

German news site golem.de reports Navigon MobileNavigator 2.5 for Android is ready for sale at the Android Market (can't find it though). Until May 2 a 30-day-trial for DACH is €50, Europe bites €75.

Assuming you got the buzz around Google Maps Navigation in the U.S. and consequently conventional PNAVs have been touted dead - or at least almost dead - here's just another perspective. GNav might swap over to Europe in 2Q10, earlier or later ... doesn't make a difference as a fully connected solution isn't a solution than rather a problem.

Though its features are impressive, breathtaking, (add your adjectives) ... it'll become a huge problem space - for both mobile carriers, end users and Google trying to offer a satisfying experience.

1. Mobile carriers want us to use mobile data but can't come up with demand: a 3G signal might be there but as too many users roam into the same UMTS cell, making everyone's share of the bandwidth smaller - resulting in insufficient bandwidth for data-hungry connected navigation solutions. Carriers can't seriously be interested in beefing up their networks as data prices drop faster than bandwidth grows. Ask any carrier rep for the realistic bandwidth available within moving vehicles ... here you go.
   
2. End Users within cars moving that are relying on their fancy iPhones and Androids become crabby as fully connected apps might well give them directions - but bandwidth is too limited to stream map tiles.
3. Google hence inevitably will offer an end-user product that is beyond their own standards of delivering a seamless user experience. Though it's free, fat and impressive - it likely won't solve the use case it was designed for: taking you safely from here to there.
4. Cost. Although the EU introduced a wholesale cap of €1 per megabyte downloaded - this quickly is eaten up by the amount of streaming map data consumed by connected devices within cars crossing European borders. Even if rendered to the smallest possible extend, the weight of many lightweight map tiles add up quickly. Consumers travelling outside their home networks will use a connected Android only once. And they will regret doing so after recovering from the exorbitant data roaming bill a month later. And this likely won't change too soon as mobile carriers love that little backdoor into our pockets. So the cost of a free product is high - for both the end user and Google.
   

There is some inherent logic why Nokia/Ovi, TomTom, Navigon and the usual suspects do only render frugal vector maps on their devices. The collateral won't change too soon: abundant bandwidth, cheap like water.

Quickly after its launch on the appstore on Oct12, german Skobbler out of nothing skyrocketed to #1 at all payed apps.

No wonder at a competitive price of €3,99 for Navteq maps on Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) and fully fledged (yet hybrid) auto and pedestrian navigation with voice guidance and turn-by-turn instructions.

That's a bargain compared to Navigon, TomTom and all the other navi apps at much higher price tags.

What started as a scoop turns into just another scoop:
as Skobbler communicates through both its (german only) blog and the descriptive page in the appstore, the initital introductory price is skipped and raised to €7,99 - and still a hot deal.

Surprisingly and effective on March 10, Skobbler announces a switch from Navteq base maps to OpenStreetMap. For whatever ever reason this announcement needed to be made in the first week premiering Skobbler on the appstore, the tactics remain unclear.

What happened?

skobbler was founded in September 2008 as a management buy-out of NAVIGON AG. The company is privately funded and shareholders are former employees of NAVIGON AG. Majority shareholder and general manager of skobbler GmbH is Peter Scheufen, who led NAVIGON AG over almost a decade as CEO. In February 2009 and out of 186 applications, skobbler promptly won the the European Navteq LBS Challenge with its cross-platform LBS application as happy Oliver Kühn received an applauded 100.000U$ worth of Navteq licences in Barcelona.

As skobbler started out as a "daily companion to urban people, combining city maps, city magazines and real-time information on connected handsets" generating suspectedly random revenues via sponsored links, the move to a competitive navigation market seemed to be too much of a stretch. Wonder who didn't like a raising star?

Will skobbler get the turn and make OSM professionally routable or did we just witness the opening episode of "one-trick pony vs the empire"?