.Dust

In the past we have writ­ten about what we think should be the per­fect GPS device to be placed in your car.

The usual GPS that you find in your car today has pre loaded maps on it, pos­si­bly sit­ting on a mem­ory card, a big screen, crys­tal clear voice that helps you dur­ing your nav­i­ga­tion. When you jump in your car you will have to tell your device where you want to go, which pref­er­ences it has to take in account while deter­min­ing the per­fect path to reach your des­ti­na­tion and then you are ready to go. From that point on the device sim­ply exe­cute the task it has been assigned. Only if you inter­act with it you have the option to change options or mod­ify the route the device has calculated.

The main issue is that the device that is in your car is not con­nected to any­thing apart from the power sup­ply and your eyes and ears.

GPS is becom­ing a com­mod­ity also on mobile phones. Unfor­tu­nately most of them do not have best of class nav­i­ga­tion appli­ca­tion, they typ­i­cally have small screens, they do not have any touch inter­face, the vol­ume of the loud­speaker is some­times not enogh. When you jump in your car you sim­ply per­form the very same tasks you do with ded­i­cated GPS nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. To be hon­est a few excep­tions exists, just like WayFinder.

The good thing is that your mobile phone is con­nected to the world via its data connection.

The idea to merge the best of these two worlds is a great idea.

GPS Dash is one of the first devices that approach this new concept.

From an hard­ware stand­point this device is pretty amazing:

• 480×272 WQVGA TFT Touch­screen LCD
• Sirf StarIII GPS Receiver
• GPRS data connection
• WiFi

I read some­where that the plat­form is built using the Open­Moko plat­form and this is really interesting.

From the soft­ware side we start to see very nice stuff:

• The device imple­ments what is called “Tru­Traf­fic”. Basi­cally the idea is that while oper­at­ing your device it will send anony­mous data to a server to track real time infor­ma­tion about the route and that data is used to sig­nal other devices in your area about changes in traf­fic sta­tus. This will cre­ate a sort of col­lab­o­ra­tive net­work of devices that will increase the accu­racy of the pre­dicted time to reach your des­ti­na­tion but, at the very same time, will make the device able to reroute you if there is heavy traf­fic ahead. This is def­i­nitely the best fea­ture I have seen in this device.
• You have pre loaded maps on the device but they will auto­mat­i­cally update over GPRS or WiFi when available.
• Since the device is con­nected to the inter­net you will find Yahoo! Search. This will be a great source of never out of data POI data for your navigation.
• Send2Car. This is another great fea­ture. You can plan your trip from your PC and then send it directly to your device while it is sit­ting in our car. Fan­tas­tic. I can also see some busi­ness use of this device.
• Theft Deter­rent. Great! Your device will be remotely dis­abled if stolen.

As you can see this is some­thing that is going to change the approach to GPS nav­i­ga­tion in the future.

Obvi­ously there are some things that need to hap­pen before the device will be really useful.

First of all you will need to have a big enough num­ber of devices around you before you will get valu­able data for your nav­i­ga­tion. I think this is the rea­son why they guys at Dash Nav­i­ga­tion Inc. are using traf­fic data com­ing from the internet.

You may also expe­ri­ence data com­mu­ni­ca­tion inter­rup­tion as you drive even if the pres­ence of both GPRS and WiFi should mit­i­gate this a lit­tle bit.

The device is going to cost 399,00 USD to which you should add from 9.99 USD to 12.99 USD for the service.

This is def­i­nitely some­thing I woud be will­ing to pay for.

Related posts:

1. The Evo­lu­tions Of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Devices
2. Cables in a wire­less world
3. GPS Reloaded
4. Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.
5. Exchange Con­tact Details By Shak­ing Hands