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Google Maps Navigation for your GPS needs

October 30th, 2009

This is one big step in technology advancement. GPS navigation is nothing new to most who knows what a GPS device is.

By far, GPS navigation or satellite navigation has been related to GPS device only, that is you buy a single GPS device which primary role is to navigate you to your desired destination.

There are various GPS device manufacturers and evolution of ideas, from pure GPS device (Papago) only, to GPS device with mobile phone ability (like
Garmin and Asus)
, to mobile phone application (like TomTom).

Google’s announcement of its Google Maps Navigation is going to change the GPS game and some even are concerned about it being a satnav killer.

Just watch the video below for a quick understanding of what Google Maps Navigation is all about:

By the way, anybody has an extra ‘I am here’ t-shirt for me? 🙂

Google Maps Navigation is an internet-connected GPS navigation system with voice guidance. It is part of Google Maps for mobile and is available for phones with Android 2.0.

This means that armed with only a phone, you can have the ability of a GPS with you. No more phone and GPS device, phone = phone + GPS.

Although current phones with Google Maps has GPS functions, but the ability of it navigating with speech is solely the strength of those satnav devices.
With Google Maps Navigation, we can now have the speech guidance, with real-time data that feeds your GPS, such as real time traffic, street view and 3D satellite view . These are some that I do not think satnav companies can do in the very near future. Of course, such real-time functions will also depend on data availability and how many users are actually using to generate such amount of data too.


Traffic view : Highlights of red is heavy traffic, and you can choose to change your route to skip that portion of traffic


Street view : Previously only available on web, now you can view the street exactly like it is


Satellite view : Sort of a three dimensional view of the location

My next trip to Broga Hill, I might just be using Google Maps Navigation that tells me where to turn and leads me the way there (not that I want to complain about my very helpful co-driver though). 🙂

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