Blackberry Software Picks Up The Pace

GPS has become very mainstream. You're right. You'll find it in rental cars, you can buy these hand-tel (PH) GPS units for $400 to $600 now. They aren't exactly drop-dead cheap, but they've gotten a lot more affordable from the thousand plus they were a couple of years ago. They have really good color screens.

These devices know where they are. They know how to tell you to get to whatever destination you want. And as you mentioned, they often have services built-in like find this certain kind of restaurant, find a gas station, find whatever I need.

And the latest wrinkle is, we're seeing the companies that make the actual maps that live inside there, teaming up with companies that ran franchises and doing branded icons. So, it isn't just find a gas station, it can be find Den Arco, find Wal-Mart, find the Wal-Mart Super Center. You can really get branded, which may sound crest in the commercial, but it's actually more useful because, let's face it, when you and I talk, we say, 'Oh yeah, let's go down to," we don't say, 'large store that sells household goods." We say, 'Hey, let's go, find our target and get that thing." Or 'Let's go find a Wal-Mart and pick up whatever we need." So, brands are important to make small navigation devices easily digestible to the eye.

It's amazing. I've been testing a lot of GPS cell phones this year with Blackberry desktop software. It's been a breakthrough year, I think, for GPS navigation on cell phones.

Blackberry has a GPS chip with Blackberry desktop software as well, so it knows where it is. And it's a relatively simple and genius system. What's really nice about that, in addition to not requiring a big hard drive in here, is that it also allows the map database to always be current. Whereas the system you might have in your car or the hand-held system, you have to download or buy a map DVD periodically and re-flash it or upgrade it yourself. That means you're always a little bit stale and out of date. These cell phone tied systems tied back to one database, they're always current. I like that a lot.

Now, have you used the one in rental cars that we've been talking about, and you've used this one, is it the same kind of experience you're getting on the cell phone?

It's amazingly close, especially now with this 3D map, which this company, TeleNav, I believe is the first to do. But I expect all the map service providers will be pushing this out to phones in this same style. So, it looks just like the system you may know from a rental car. The voice prompts are just the same. It'll say 'Turn right in 400 yards, 300 yards, 200 yards."

It counts it down for you. The only difference, of course, is the screen is fairly small. So if you can't deal with the size of this screen, this wouldn't work for you. And I found the volume on this phone was just too low. I couldn't get it over the noise of the car that I was in. But I took this on an extended trip yesterday to about, about four locations on about 150-mile drive around Northern California, and I didn't find that I was lacking for anything except a little bigger screen and a little more volume.

But, you know, I can live with that, for the fact that I don't have to carry a separate device, a separate charger, have to go spend five or 600 bucks. It's a compromise I can live with.

Blackberry Software