Wednesday, November 12. 2008

Telecoms.com on PND vs. Smartphone

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?