Excerpts here - read on your own, this is an eye-opener.
In-Stat has put 2007 PND shipments at 30.7 million and forecasts rapid growth to 68 million by 2012. (...) in the second quarter of this year, handset shipments hit almost 305 million by Gartner's estimation
So there's a 1:10 relation between PNDs and smart mobile phones.
Proponents of mobile navigation services point to the size of the addressable market. For PNDs this is the number of motor vehicles. For mobile navigation services it's the number of people.
GPS capability isn't recognized as some obscure geekish feature any more:
And Nokia's senior vice president for context and advertising solutions, Ilkka Raiskinen, says that GPS functionality is now viewed by the market as a default capability for smartphones, like cameras and mp3 players. So if 30 million smartphones (ten per cent of Gartner's sales figure) are being shipped each quarter, navigation-capable mobile phones are outselling PNDs four to one.
There's truth and realism in this statement. As a consumer, you didn't have a real choice to get a phone without either mp3- or photo features. There won't be much choice in upmarket segments and no escape in the smartphone market: GPS is there to stay.
The basic question that is nicely dissected in the article goes like "Will dedicated PNDs or allrounder smartphones win?" The answer is neither absolute nor groundbreaking: both will coexist and PNDs certainly do have specialized niches.
"This is not a black and white situation."
Both Nokia's Ilkka Raiskinen and Mark Gretton, TomTom's engineering director are quoted.
A more advanced driver is: will consumers prefer the 'one-off purchase' model of PNDs (buy once, use concurrently or 'free after purchase cost') or will consumers go for the model of 'navigation as a payed service', hence ongoing cost?
A one-off cost may appeal to the consumer, but it's not enough for the likes of TomTom. With current pricing models PND firms can only increase their revenues by selling to new customers. What they now want is ongoing relationships with their users which is why, as the mobile sector gravitates towards navigation, the PND suppliers are advancing on mobile.
Nokia's Ilkka Raiskinen is quoted with recognizing mobile users' reluctance if travelling (usecase: get navigation and directions when travelling):
"People need to be careful how they use these services, especially when they're roaming. But we and the operators are working on schemes to make this more affordable," he says. "So we need to tell people to pre-load the maps when they're at home and just using the service for the navigation element. If you use it like that there's a huge impact on the amount of data you need to download. We need to be extremely careful how we market this and inform the consumers about the smartest way of using these types of services."
There's many testimonials and angry comments by people travelling and being faced with hefty roaming charges back home. Data roaming isn't transparent far aside from being affordable (even if you roam within your carriers' network).
TomTom's Mark Gretton sums it up:
"The only thing you can say today is that navigation is a real market; a service for which people are prepared to pay. All that other stuff, all those other applications, it's just speculation. We don't know whether or not it will prove valuable to people."
