The End of Special Purpose Handheld GPS?

As a follow up to my story last year on how Google and Apple's iPhone are making Garmin irrelevant, it looks like the broader market is coming to the same conclusion. Although the touchstone on this story is Google's announcement about their turn-by-turn navigation software showing up on Android, the same software will no doubt make it's way to the iPhone as well. In short, the life of the special purpose GPS unit that keeps all of its maps locally is coming to an end. The ability to auto-update a map is just extremely important. For the situations where speed or lack of network access are concerns, better and better cacheing comes to the rescue.

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Google Android Garmin GPS iPhone

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Comments (2)

Anders from NY

I didn't realize Google had dropped both NavTeq and Tele Atlas in favor of their own dataset. Makes sense that they would do this and further illustrates why not only the Garmins and Tom-Toms of the world are toast but how the entire industry has been radically eviscerated. The landscape is going to be radically different in a year or two. I wouldn't be surprised to see "nav data for free" as Google's offer to in-car GPS manufacturers if they pick Android.

Darrin Keller from Salt Lake City / Utah / USA

I wish you were wrong but I think you could be right. I bought stock in Garmin and I'm holding it to see what they do to reinvent themselves. They have lots of cash, still plenty of sales and ZERO debt. I think one thing they have that you may not have considered is their workout products that include heart rate, GPS, etc. It will be interesting to see how they evolve.