[maemo-users] Google Maps Navigation takes a mobile turn

[From: Mark Haury]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10384544-265.html?tag=nl.e703

Finally, a navigation solution for handhelds that really works. As soon 
as T-Mobile comes out with an Android 2.0 phone that I like, it's 
sayonara to the piece of crap TomTom I bought a couple of months ago 
(I'm on the third unit with a defective battery and am not going to 
bother sending this one in - I'll replace the battery myself - but 
that's just scratching the surface of all the horrible design problems. 
I incorrectly assumed that TomTom had been around long enough to figure 
out how to make a gpsr, but I should have stuck with Garmin) as well as 
my Nokia tablet that never really did anything well and is now dying an 
ugly death due to corrupt and probably failing internal flash memory.

Maybe this will force the standalone gps manufacturers to bring the map 
update prices down to something approaching reasonable. Or even run them 
all out of business, which they so richly deserve after all these years 
of highway robbery. 95% of the map data they get for free from 
governments and other free and public sources, at least 4% of it is 
corrections from their own consumers who have paid dearly for maps, and 
_maybe_ 1% of it is obtained in-house. And since at least 95% of any 
given map update is identical to the old map, it's absurd to assert that 
they have any real financial investment in it. It's a racket very like 
the printer manufacturers who sell some printers near and sometimes even 
below cost, but make such extremely high profit margins on the ink and 
toner that they could give the printers away for free and it wouldn't 
make any difference. Can you say "at least 6000% profit"?!?!? (Except 
the GPS manufacturers are making a very healthy profit on the hardware 
as well.)

Mark