Symbian Blog

This week, San Jose is welcoming the 6th annual US Navigation and Location conference.

Nav&Loc 09 is a place where Navigation players meet in order to shape the future of Navigation Based Services. This year’s conference is an important milestone in the Navigation landscape.

Only last month Google announced “Google Maps Navigation”, bringing a free solution to consumers and seriously disrupting  the paid-for market. By providing free access to navigation content, Google has seriously undermined the business model of most of the top players.

This had a major impact on the stock market as well. Tomtom, a navigation services company, lost 21% on their share following the announcement.

With Navigation migrating to mobile phones, the sales of Personal Navigation Device (PND), have declined, forcing manufacturers to adopt new strategies. Garmin, leader in the PND makert, have had to come up with a Garmin phone. The nuvifone embeds Garmin’s top of the line Navigation solution with phone functionality.

As a side effect of Mobile Phone navigation solutions spreading, car manufacturers have to differentiate their built in car navigation offering. Coming up as an option on most midrange vehicles, it remains an expensive one.

Symbian being an Embedded Real Time OS, it could support the industry in migrating to a more standard solution, based on open source and an open community.

I will be representing the Symbian Community during the keynote panel at the conference. If you have any specific questions, or comments, please, add them to this blog post.

I will be talking about how the Symbian Open Governance model will help content owners to enable Symbian developers to use their content.

How for device manufacturers migrating to a future proof open source OS will reduce development costs and shift resources towards productization of experiences, enabling devices to be closer to consumer needs, and services to take off.

And I will look at how Symbian is the perfect candidate to enable in car entertainment/navigation systems. Bringing 3G/4G/LTE on each display, enabling installation of applications/games, supporting multimedia content. Pushing further, Symbian could be the heart of in cars control units (ECU), providing a new range of opportunities in term of measurements and analysis.