Voice-Based Turn-By-Turn GPS Coming to iPhone 3G. Not Here Yet, Though

by Jody Mitoma on August 19, 2008 at 10:20 pm

The App Store has yet to avail a voice-based turn-by-turn GPS system for download.

With Apple’s new GPS features within the iPhone 2.0 firmware, you’d expect that a turn-by-turn, voice-based GPS system would of been available by now, but unfortunately, that is not the case.

TomTom, Garmin, and Magellan, some of the larger GPS companies of today, are very interested in the iPhone’s ability to do so, and will most likely reveal something sooner than later, however, nothing has been revealed to the public as of yet, and the App Store has been available for more than a month now.

One problem that may be getting in the way is Apple. Apple needs to approve all applications that are brought to their attention for the App Store, and it just may be that they aren’t agreeing with what is being brought to the table.

“We have made our navigation system run on the iPhone; it looks good and works very well,” said Dutch-based company TomTom, in a statement to msnbc.com. “We will have to look more closely to Apple’s strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us.”

Garmin offers a $99/year “Garmin Mobile” plan for GPS-equipped smartphones, including certain models of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry and Samsung’s Blackjack. But nothing in turns of the iPhone, yet.

“We’re always looking at new phone platforms to expand into for Garmin Mobile, but we don’t have any announcements regarding the iPhone at this time,” said Jessica Myers of Garmin International.

Magellan spokesman Raphel Finelli said the company does “not have immediate plans for this, but we are looking into it.”

Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies market analyst, said “in talking to some of the guys in the software community, they believe we’ll see voice turn-by-turn directions within the next three months” for the iPhone, and certainly “before the end of the year.” Lets just hope he’s right.

Sal Dhanani, the co-founder of TeleNav, which is a GPS software maker, said that as soon as Apple announced the SDK, the company purchased a copy and started working on a GPS program for the iPhone.

“Just like every other developer, we signed up for the program and downloaded the SDK, even though there were some specific clauses in the developer agreement that said you can’t write GPS navigation applications,” he said.

Dhanani said TeleNav has proceeded ahead with its GPS program, TeleNav Navigator, for the iPhone, and found that it works quite well on the device “which is more than capable of providing an application like this,” he said. “The GPS worked really well.”

Another possibility is that Apple themselves are working on a GPS application for release within the App Store. This may be reason that Apple is not allowing other companies and developers to release such applications yet.

We’ll definitely let you know if there are any breakthrough announcements about voice-based turn-by-turn GPS systems for the iPhone in the future.

(via MSNBC)

If you enjoyed this story, join the growing number of subscribers to our RSS Feed for live updates!

Related Stories:

• There are no related stories for this entry.

Posted in Apple Corporate, Application Related, In The Works