The people in my office has been convincing me to switch from my iPhone to an Andriod phone because of various reasons, but I’ve never bothered to look at them because I think they are all the same as smartphones. I just don’t see them as any different although I keep on hearing things like iPhone don’t do this and that. Personally I don’t get bothered by the fact that Apple maintains tight control over their product and it’s not as open as Andriod because we still have hordes of people making apps for Apple.
However, with today’s announcement from Google that they will giveaway the GPS navigation on their Andriod phones for free, this may finally be a game-changer. Google has literally poo-pooed on TomTom and Garmin’s stocks when these companies solely depend on selling navigation devices. Nothing beats free when compared to a $80+ app. Of course with Google you still need 3G data access to pull maps from Google, but I don’t think Google will take long to figure this out to allow caching locally on your phone. Well I don’t know if Apple will actually allow Google to put the navigation app on the iPhone because this will literally mean TomTom/Garmin will have to give them away for free as well, and today marks a new low for navigation apps. If it’s not available on iPhone I would seriously actually switch to Andriod just because of this software, especially Ontario has finally outlawed fiddling around with phones while driving.
I actually find product makes a lot of sense for Google because Google sells ads locally, and this product definitely gives Google another piece of important real estate to serve ads for local businesses to the user. Google had all the technological pieces for a long time so it’s just a matter of time before Google realizes can actually make a competitive product. With GOOG-411 running for years, I’m sure Google has collected enough user inputs to make their speech recognition engine useful enough to understand what the user says for navigation, and I think Google will work hard to continue to own this piece of real estate (your phone screen) while you are driving.
Nothing really beats free – and free can be a real game changer especially in the technology sector. I really want to download the “Free” book written by Chris Anderson but it’s actually not free in printed form, or at least free outside of US. I did download the audio version for free but I don’t know whether I would like to listen to a book though. I should try the local library for free books.
