The industry's been talking for over a year about turn-by-turn nav becoming potentially available on the iPhone. The size of the iPhone screen is as big as many GPS personal navigation devices and, in my opinion, would be more than ideal for in-car nav, when mounted on the car windscreen.
Apple's iPhone SDK Terms & Conditions do not allow turn-by-turn nav - when I ask around, I hear that the reason is probably mostly technical (i.e. background processing on the slow iPhone chip would really eat up compute cycles and potentially interfere with the primary functionality of phone calls and music). I've also heard that Apple may have designs on the navigation space itself - there have been rumors that all the mobile nav apps companies, including Telenav, NIM and Decarta, have gone through a beauty contest at Apple headquarters in Cupertino
Now we have a prototype of a working turn-by-turn nav app for the iPhone. Thanks to The iPhone Blog for catching this demo at Mobile World Congress.
I think it will be quite a while until Apple allows this to appear on the App Store, unless the iPhone chipset gets faster. Not only are companies like Sygic interested in the iPhone market, I'm sure many of the GPS device makers such as TomTom, Garmin and (formerly) Dash would be interested. The ad-supported nav vendors that have appeared in Europe over the past year are probably also watching developments on the iPone - these include Amaze and Nav4All. There are also a slew of consumer-generated (maps+traffic+nav) companies that will be launching soon that will look at the iPhone market. Stay tuned!
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