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PC World has a listing of all the tech gadgets it thinks are outrageously expensive, including a some geo-ones.

GPS Devices with 5-inch (or Larger) Screens
Price: $600 and up
GPS Analyst Craig Ellison says: In general, I found that GPS devices with a screen size of 5 inches or larger seemed disproportionately higher priced with less features compared to the traditional 4.3-inch ones. Such products are the Magellan Maestro 5310 ($800) and the Garmin nüvi 5000 ($600). Sure, Garmin can get away with high prices since its models have a unique feature—voice recognition—that none of the other products have, but they're still priced way too high.

Telecoms.com delves into the convergence of PNDs and cellphone nav offerings. There are some great quotes here including:

His [Orem Neilson of Telmap's] enthusiasm is not shared by Steve Crammond, a partner at PA Consulting. Crammond believes that the PND suppliers, led by US firm Garmin and Dutch vendor TomTom, are not under threat from the mobile sector. "The PND manufacturers supply something that people need. It does something useful, it sells well, it's got a good price and it doesn't seek to replicate anybody else's services or facilities. It's not broken and it doesn't need fixing. What is broken is the mobile sector's ambition to create vast amounts of service revenue out of LBS on phones," he says.

Perhaps, but there is another competitor - pre-installed in-dash solutions from the auto manufacturers. But, there is a lag on that...

Mark Gretton is TomTom's engineering director: "We proved that there was a real market need, which was to get people from A to B when they didn't know where B was. We're beyond that point now and we've realised that the number of times you drive to B when you don't know where B is, is actually not that often, unless you're a professional driver."

Right, thus PND providers must offer more - including a connected solution - with search, music etc. That leads to monthly fees, something most PND buyers are not yet fully ready to embrace, per the article.

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."

That's to say, navigation people will pay for - at least as a one off payment for a device. Now, can the same be said for LBS with the same amount of confidence?

"While I rely on my GPS to compensate for my terrible sense of direction, that price seems a bit high to pay for a 3D map of Chicago and its mostly flat surrounding areas. It's an impressive novelty, but it is still just a novelty."

Scott Nichols wrote that in PC World about the not yet released $599 Navigon 8100T GPS model which uses "NASA terrain elevation data in conjunction with a built-in 3D accelerator" to offer "true 3D."

- PC World in Washington Post

TeleNav is known as the company that provides voice directions on your cell phone. Now it's in the hardware business with the $300 TeleNav Shotgun. That includes 3 months of service - monthly service starts at $11 and packages are available. It's a connected solution, not using wi-fi, as the Dash Express (the company is now out of the hardware biz) did but rather GPRS (cell network).

The value of the worldwide market for car navigation devices fell 21 percent in the third quarter per research firm Canalys. Much of the drop can be attributed to lower prices, but encroachment of handsets helped, too. The firm also puts Garmin back atop the marketshare heap at 35%; TomTom in #2 with 29%.

- Reuters