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Electronic House: For a while there, it was easy to get lost in the GPS market. Now the smoke seems to be clearing just a bit. Hot on the heels of Magellan’s announcement, both Panasonic and Harman/Kardon say they are also getting out of the portable GPS market.

Harman introduced the Becker earlier this year. Also, Panasonic will keep its Strada in-dash navigation line, says Twice. The economy has been cited in both decisions.

Earlier this week, Magellan announced it would sell its consumer line to Mitac, the makers of Mio. Audiovox, JVC and Cobra are a few of the others that recently got out of the GPS market. 

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CrunchGear: Magellan is moving past the highly competitive consumer GPS market.

The entire sector will be sold off to MiTAC International, the folks behind the Mio GPS brand, at the end of January ’09.

The future of Magellan’s three brands, RoadMate, Maestro, and Triton, is unclear but one thing is for certain: there are way too many GPS options available. Sure, everyone should have the ability to make their own products, but there are a lot of GPS units on the market.

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Tech On: The huge increase in sales of portable navigation devices (PND) has made an impact on the car navigation market, which now looks set to split into two areas: low-priced PNDs, and high-function HDD-based systems.

“PNDs just swiped the market right out from under us,” complained a management-level source at one Japanese car navigation system manufacturer. It would be no exaggeration to say that in Europe, “car navigation” means PNDs. Equipped with a 5-inch or smaller liquid crystal display (LCD) panel and Flash memory holding map data, these simple car navigation systems provide guidance via map displays.

As of 2004, the total worldwide sales of PNDs reached only several hundred thousand units annually. This jumped to over five million in 2005, and again to over 10 million the following year, surpassing the installed car navigation market in which the Japanese car navigation system manufacturers had been doing so well.

The PND market is presently driven by TomTom NV of the Netherlands, Garmin International Inc of the US and MiTac International Corp of Taiwan. Of these, the first two firms command 60% or more of the market, and together with MiTac International hold about 80%. PND demand shows no signs of slacking off and, one PND manufacturer said, “There are signs that it’s going to be a big hit in the US in 2007, following its success in Europe.”

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