The past week has been a busy one in the GPS industry. Magellan, the former 3rd best selling PND brand in the United States, was purchased by MiTAC International early in the week. MiTAC is also the parent company of Mio. Whether or not the acquisition will be a good thing for the Magellan brand remains to be seen, but there will definitely be work to do. Nextar took over the third spot from Magellan in the United States for the 3rd quarter–though far behind Garmin and TomTom.
Several more GPS companies announced this week that they’d either be leaving the industry altogether, selling or restructuring. Clarion announced it was restructuring its distribution chain in the United States which sparked a bit of a dispute when I predicted the company’s eventual demise. However, Clarion does have some interesting things ready for CES next month and the ClarionMiND is apparently selling well in the United States. Blaupunkt, formerly owned by Bosch, was sold to German holding company Aurelius for an undisclosed sum and will continue to manufacture portable navigation devices. Finally, for this week anyway, Harman pulled out of the GPS industry altogether and Panasonic will only continue its Strada in-dash line.
On the mobile side of things, Garmin’s nuviphone finally revealed itself in an FCC filing confirming it’ll hit the United States sometime in the first quarter of 2009. And after hearing that the Clear WiMAX network would officially launch January 6, 2009, it was a shock to hear that it was under threat by a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Texas-based Adaptix, a WiMAX service provider. It’ll be interesting to watch how this battle plays out. Speaking of WiMAX, Sprint, a major partner in the fourth generation rollout, rolled out its own location-based application development platform supported by technology from uLocate Communications and WaveMarket. Recall that uLocate Communications, developer of the popular WHERE application, is an LBS provider for the former Xohm network, now Clear.
Palm also debuted an application store, though not proprietary, as the once dominant cellphone maker continues to struggle under the thumb of Research in Motion and Apple. We also saw plenty of great new mobile LBS apps this week and I’m sure that’ll be a trend that we continue to see in the future! I want to throw out a couple of plugs for apps this week as well: Zhiing and Zannel, both tons of fun and useful at the same time.
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(Image Credit: cmpalmer)