Cell Phones to Eat Into Specialty Navigation Market

I saw this coming and its nice to hear it from the experts:

Strategy Analytics, cellular phone companies and traditional automotive system suppliers are now well-positioned to present a serious competitive response to the low-cost, well-branded navigation products from TomTom, Garmin, Magellan and others. Indeed, the firm predicted that cell phones will take a 30 percent slice of 88 million unit navigation market by 2010.

Perhaps more interesting is this comment from Joanne Blight, director of Strategy Analytics’s automotive practice.

The next challenge is to meet the needs of the much larger consumer segment who require route guidance on a far less regular basis. These consumers will require products that combine and integrate navigation with a range of other features, starting with road traffic information, but increasingly requiring entertainment and innovative location-based applications.

That’s quite correct; most of time, most of us travel in small known orbits. We’ll want other features while we travel therein, specifically traffic information.