Routeplanners: SatNav & GPS News

This week at the CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment show, Navigon will demonstrate its Mobile Navigator 6 Wireless Edition, which it is making available to North American carriers and device manufacturers.

The product reflects what Navigon’s customers have come to expect in the personal navigation device (PND) space, says Andreas Hecht, Navigon’s North American senior vice president and general manager. After more than a decade at Navteq, Hecht joined Navigon in May.

Navigon says its MobileNavigator 6 Premium Edition, already available in Europe, is designed for high-end devices, taking the Mobile Navigator product’s ease of use and introducing superior speed, performance and features such as text-to-speech technology. North America availability is tentatively slated for late 2006 or early next year.

Hecht says the Navigator 6 Wireless Edition - developed with the help of Germany’s Franuhofer Institute, inventors of the MP3 file format - offers a superb look and feel, and it’s available on more platforms than any other comparable software on the market, including Windows Mobile 5 smartphone edition, the Palm operating system, J2ME and Symbian Series 60. “I think it is a unique offering and it doesn’t really overlap with anything that’s out there,” he says.

At CTIA’s spring convention last April, Navigon’s MobileNavigator 5.3 PNA Transonic 5000 was recognized as a leading wireless emerging technology. The PNA Transonic 5000 is an all-in-one GPS navigation system with a built-in GPS receiver and real-time traffic updates. Additional features include speed limit warning and turn-by-turn voice guidance.

Navigon says the PNA enables precise door-to-door navigation anywhere in the United States, whether by car, bike or foot, allowing a user to drive from Boston to San Francisco without ever having to stop and change a map.