Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
• Navigation with moving maps that switch direction as you do, with well-timed voice instructions. Also, it does not matter if you miss a turn – Vodafone Compass instantly adjusts and continue to guide you, recalculating your route automatically
• Choose between looking at a map or easy-to-use directions page on screen
• Full pedestrian navigation experience, with clear maps that show all street names and thousands of relevant points of interest
• Easy location finder, allowing you to enter full or partial addresses, or look for a location by postcode. Easy-scroll menus of pre-loaded street names and suburbs make entering an address quick, easy and accurate. Vodafone Compass allows you to store your office, home and favourite locations, and also stores the last 50 destinations to which you have navigated
• Answer the phone as often as you like while navigating – Vodafone Compass keeps supplying instructions on the screen while you talk
These are the kinds of features you’d expect of today’s standalone GPS devices and GPS-equipped or connected smartphones, with more to come as companies think of other ways to enhance the service and compete.
Nokia’s own GPS software has been improved and updated, and with Nokia’s US $8b purchase of GPS mapping company Navteq (and pipping Google to the purchase) doing a bit of ante upping all its own, the GPS and navigation segment of the market is red hot right now and will increasingly be a service taken for granted by all.
With GPS, seeking and finding has never been easier, and chances are you already own a device or soon will that is either already GPS ready, or can have GPS easily added. All you’ll need to decide is who gets the yearly mapping software fee from you – the traditional GPS device manufacturers, phone manufacturers or phone companies.
They’re the companies vying for our navigation dollar. Naturally Vodafone Compass is for Vodafone customers only, whether existing or new, as Vodafone look for ways to differentiate their service from competitors with features not yet available on other handsets.
If GPS navigation is of interest, it’s worth exploring Vodafone’s phone based alternative. Some users will undoubtedly prefer the larger touch screens of dedicated GPS devices, but for many users a phone based GPS solution, from one of the providers out there, will be more than good enough and could even be better through greater portability.
The GPS war hasn’t been won yet, with even more accurate and more intelligent map detail, data and direction to come, but today’s solutions definitely deliver.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
