CES 2009 Las Vegas 8-11 January

[MikeB]

It is January 1st, and that can only mean two things: I have a hangover from last night and I need to get packing ready for CES in Las Vegas.

CES 2009 will be interesting. When the World is in the middle of an economic downturn Consumer Electronics are not the first thing on most people's shopping lists. Coupled with the dive that Sterling has taken just visiting the USA is going to be expensive this year. With this foundation the CES exhibitors need to put on some spectacular presentations to entice the buyers.

Already I have heard that a number of Far Eastern companies will not be attending, the economics of exhibiting just don't work for them. On the other hand we will still see a lot of high cost marketing there. Dozens of celebrities from all walks of life have been contracted from Sports Stars to Music greats such as Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross. So it sounds like the party budget is still in place.

On a more serious note the major GPS players will be there, including TomTom, Garmin, Mio and Magellan. We are wondering if Magellan will be on the Mio stand like Navman were last year. We are expecting an announcement from Eclipse regarding the latest in-dash version of TomTom (a not too well kept secret). As usual there will be companies from around the globe attempting to secure a slice of the lucrative pie that is the US electronics market.

The PocketGPSWorld.com CES 2009 team will include Darren, Lutz and Mike. Together we will be ferreting out the juicy news and some of the more odd products on show in Sin City. As usual if you have any questions that you would like us to put to the GPS companies please post your queries in this CES forum thread and we will do our best to ask the right people.
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Mike Barrett

[juwlz]

Either I've missed something, or the New Year celebtrations mean people's attention is elsewhere!

Anyway, given that TomTom were allegedly attempting to produce a navigation solution for the fashionable but relatively low-volume sales iPhone, do they have any plans to resume work on software for higher volume if less fashionable platform smartphones? My personal interest is in TomTom on Symbian S60 3rd edition (for my Nokia E90, likely to be upgrading to an N97 when available), but I'm sure there are plenty of Windows Mobile users out there who'd be delighted to have updated software available and supported.

I've been evaluating a number of alternative navigation solutions for S60 3rd Edition, but frankly, none of them can hold a candle to TomTom. Not that TomTom is perfect, but at least it has a friendly UI and generally comes up with more-or-less sensible routes and well-timed voice instructions. It lets me specify where I want to get to accurately, and it doesn't crash all the time!

I live in hope, but I despair of anybody producing software for the smartphone that I'd be happy to rely on - even as an occasional backup to my now-aging TomTom One. TomTom's intelligent routing (based on avg speeds at different times of day) and anonymous traffic speed feedback for traffic info all sounds interesting, but I don't currently have access to it.

The other avenue I'd be interested in is whether Google might ever produce a turn-by-turn version of Google Maps. I understand that the licences for maps including the info for voice navigation are more expensive, and I wouldn't expect it to be free (as gMaps currently is - without voice navigation) - but I'd really like to see Google have a go.

Julie

[lbendlin]

Sorry, but we haven't heard anything from TomTom that would hint at any form of resurrection of the Symbian client. Even the Pocket PC client updates (now at 7.910) are more of a concession to HTC rather than a serious product roadmap.
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Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

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