Clarion DTR-P50, Clarion DTR-P70 Portable GPS Units Get Japanese Release
Clarion Japan released the DTR-P50 and DTR-P70 portable navigation systems today, both with 4.3-inch LCD touchscreens and the DTR-P70 boasts 1seg support for both recording and playback of mobile TV. Why can’t we in North America make our portable GPS units a little more entertaining?
Other than the mobile TV feature, both Clarion units are pretty well identical, run on Windows CE 5.0 and powered by a 400 Mhz processor. Other features included on both units Bluetooth, support for MP3, WMA, WMV, and MPEG-4 audio and video codecs, an SDHC port, and 2 GB of internal memory.
Via Akihabara News
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If you like this then please subscribe to the April 16, 2008 No Comments
SiRF Losing Money And Downsizing, Om Malik Says Portable GPS Is Dead
SiRF, the company whose chipsets power some of the world’s most popular GPS navigation devices, is set to cut 7% of its workforce due to losses as the prices of consumer GPS devices continue to drop and sales are below expectations. The cuts come after SiRF announced their first quarter financial expectations have dropped by $10 million and will also result in the closing of two offices-one in San Francisco and the other in Stockholm, Sweden.
The company will also be killing off their in-development mobile TV business due to short-term losses-normal for new businesses, but not something SiRF can absorb at the moment. While mobile TV will probably become fairly “mainstream” at some point, it’s an emerging trend at the moment, and definitely not the business to enter for a financially strapped company.
Om Malik of broadband blog GigaOm believes that SiRF’s problems are indicative of pending disaster in the GPS industry. Being the chipset supplier of popular consumer brands such as Garmin and TomTom, SiRF’s issues are easy to extrapolate to the portable GPS market. This is probably likely in the short term, but long term could see portable navigation devices obliterated by the growing mobile phone market, says Malik. It seems many of the newly released mobile models this year feature integrated GPS functionality or at least the ability to use navigational apps. I can’t see this happening too soon. Maybe in a couple of years when GPS-enabled phones are ubiquitous, but automotive GPS in North America is only in its beginning stages and cell phone GPS will never replace automotive GPS in any practical (and safe) way.
March 27, 2008 5 Comments