The Coming App for the iPhone: GPS enabled navigation
Competition is a strange motivating force. When Apple decided not to include GPS navigation as a part of their original iPhone, no one complained too loudly. After all, using a cell phone for GPS navigational purposes had not yet caught on as a preferred feature. Plus the fact that Apple was trying to keep the cost of the iPhone within limits so that the price wouldn’t have to increase accordingly.
Did they make the right decision? In retrospect, probably not, because the popularity of GPS navigation enabled smart phones has grown considerably. But you cannot decipher how much additional revenues the feature would have produced so it is a mute point.
Apple is still has the most in-demand smart phone on the planet and that is unlikely to change even with the announcement of the new model which will most likely be GPS navigation enabled.
The competition is already there. Google will have a free app that features turn-by-turn and voice aided GPS navigation on its Android phone. Nokia will offer the same features on several of its smart phones. And the other manufacturers will have the same.
The most recent revelation about the new Apple iPhone was revealed when an Apple employee inadvertently left one of the new devices which was disguised as a current model on a bar stool in March 2010. It found its way into the hands of technogeeks at Gizmodo and they took their sweet time finding out all about this new model.
This news story explains why Apple could not get the phone back through conventional means and mentions that the GPS app called MobileMe (which allows owners to track down their lost phones) does not work on version 4 of the operating system. This did not prevent Apple technicians from disabling the phone (wiping it out completely) from afar, however, once it was discovered that it had been lost.
Is GPS Functionality Important?
It is apparently important enough for Apple to include as a method of finding lost phones, and is just beginning to be important enough to write an app for and implement a support structure.
Already, Apple has purchased a mapping company as of last summer that will provide new and updated maps for the new iphone. The hope is that GPS navigation will be among the features to use those maps.
This all dovetails nicely with Apple’s overall goal for their products: on demand content. In the very near future it will become very clear that Apple is all about delivering things like GPS enabled content (navigation, etc) on their products to end users. And yes, GPS Enabled navigation will be a part (albeit a small part) of this business model.
Tags: Android Phone, Decipher, GPS Functionality, GPS Navigation, GPS Tracking, iphone, MobileMe
No related posts.
