Who is better? Dedicated Sat Nav or Mobile with GPS & Apps?
On the back of the post I wrote the other day regarding the capabilities of the TomTom Go 940 Live, it seems that the margins between functionality of specialised Sat Navs and Mobille devices (with GPS) are narrowing.
Even with Google’s innovative work in plugging just about every service in to their ‘Cloud’ Mapping apps, the value-add coming from the Mobile Sector that isn’t in the field of expertise of the Sat Nav companies is slowly but surely getting smaller.
Nice features the new Sat Navs have are things like ‘lane assist’ (more accurate metadata around which lanes you should be in for a given junction/turn etc), live traffic updates (via both Bluetooth to a 3G Mobile, plus FM data-channel reception), and also Speakerphone functions for your Mobile device.
On the Mobile side, we have a slew of ‘directions’ variants, such as walking/public transport/car, street-view/Satellite/3D view mashups, and some nice recommendations/proximity services.
The question I pose is this however: on a practical day-to-day basis, which is the most useful? I put my vote in the TomTom camp, because it does one thing – but VERY well. I have a permanent power supply to the TomTom wired in to my car, and it looks neat and Tidy. And it just works. Did I mention that already?
Let us know if you have some views on this – I’d imagine there are going to be no shortage of users that prefer the ‘new services offering’ that many Mobile devices have. On the flip side, some of the new breed of Sat Navs are rather good indeed…
Footnote: the somewhat ironic introduction of ‘widescreen’ Sat Navs has started to increase the physical sizes of devices again – quite apart from the fact that ‘screen width’ isn’t necessarily the most useful extra dimension for a Sat Nav device… sigh….