Google Says It Plans to Bring Its Free Navigation App to Smart Phones

[Pedro2NR]

oogle confirmed at a London press conference that it plans to bring its free turn-by-turn navigation app to other smartphone platforms.

Google Maps Navigation requires an active data connection when planning routes, though not while traveling.

?Google Maps pre-caches the entire route,? said Mobile Maps product manager, Steve Lee. ?It needs a data connection when you ask for navigation. But while driving to your destination, if you intermittently lose the connection, it will still carry on. As long as you stay on the route.?

You can take a look at the Android app in action by watching the video below.

YouTube - Google Maps Navigation (Beta)

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[gatorguy]

The big part of that announcement was that the iPhone platform was mentioned specifically. As such, expect prices for apps from TomTom and Navigon to take a beating. The Google Nav app is actually quite good, thos not on par with TomTom/Navigon/CoPilot, etc. But comparing FREE to apps costing $50+, I'm pretty sure which will be chosen more often than not. Apple's going to be looking for some way to reject the app and not come across as simply greedy, protecting their 30% commission from paid nav software. IMO (and those of a few others) this will be on the iPhone with this summer's 4.0 update.

Suddenly the Garmin plan to concentrate on smartphone hardware (GarminFone) rather than only software solutions may not be so dumb after all. I see the death of premium paid navigation services coming, and much more quickly than most anticipated.

 

[Pedro2NR]

There will be definitely a change down the road. I agree with you on Apple rejecting the app.
It would be nice to have.

 

[Pedro2NR]

Here is an update

No sooner did the UK announcement of Google Maps Navigation bring word that an iPhone version would follow… some day, then Google goes into disaster recovery mode and says, um, uh… maybe not:
“We did not say we would bring it to iPhone, we said to date we’ve had it on Android and that in the future it may come to other platforms but did not confirm this will be coming to iPhone at all.”
In all fairness, it’s likely far more complicated to get Google Maps Navigation on the iPhone because, while Google can do what they want on their own Android Platform, Apple builds the Maps UI on the iPhone and controls the App Store, and that means Google and Apple likely have to work together to get this done and delivered. They’ve done that in the past with the built-in Street View and the separate Google Mobile app, but utterly failed to do it with Latitude, for example. (Never mind the colossal cluster-frak that was Google Voice).?