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The Guardian:  We couldn’t believe that headline, either.  But according to Computing Which? magazine, motorists should not bother switching on that fancy piece of kit on your dashboard. The consumer magazine Computing Which? has confirmed what thousands of frustrated motorists already know from bitter experience: that the best source of directions is not an expensive satellite navigation system, but a map. 

In a trial that will delight Luddites and the long-suffering partners of gadget enthusiasts, the magazine tested four route-finding aids to determine the best way to reach a particular destination. Three hi-tech systems, including a £220 satnav box, a Microsoft software package and the government’s own direction-finding website, were tested alongside the more old-fashioned method. The most effective? A copy of the AA’s Great Britain Road Atlas, priced £8 (€12) from most petrol stations.

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Slashgear: Be honest with me now. Do women actually need their own, specially-designed sat-nav? Mio seems to think so, although “specially-designed” to them appears to mean “slap some flowers on it”.
The H610 has the dubious pleasure of being the first GPS unit aimed squarely at women, costing £280 (418 euro) and sporting a variety of interchangeable bezels. There are maps of 24 European countries as well as in excess of 1.8 million TeleAtlas POI, but of course women will be more interested in the clothing size conversion calculator also built-in.

For tech specs, please visit the Mio H610 productpage.

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Evo: Here is the new Traffic Assist Pro 7929. German maker Becker teamed up with Ferrari to create the £410 (€612) device.

As well as a four-inch touch-screen and maps of 37 countries, it has an MP3 player and a picture viewer.

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BBC News: More gift-seekers will go online and satellite navigation systems will fill Santa’s sack this Christmas, a leading retail analyst says.

Verdict Research’s seasonal forecast of the UK market says that price cuts and product improvements will push sat-nav devices up the Christmas wish-list.

But it also warns retailers they will see margins squeezed by higher costs.

Verdict predicts that the UK’s total Christmas shopping spend will rise 3.3% to £74.4bn in 2006.

Verdict expects the overall value of goods bought online during the last three months of the year to shoot up by 35% to £3.4bn.

Higher wages, energy and logistics costs will combine with the growing cost of goods from China to make this the first Christmas in six years that overall shop prices will not fall, according to the report.

Targeted promotions will highlight price cuts on selected items, but prices will creep up for other goods, Verdict says.

Verdict thinks that a much-anticipated Bank of England interest rate rise in November will not dampen consumers’ desire to spend for Christmas.

It believes shoppers will remain determined to splash out in the run-up to the holiday and then tighten their belts in early 2007.

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The Register: Car navigation equipment maker TomTom has lost its “me too” design infringment case against Garmin.

In a normal summary proceeding TomTom asked a judge to prevent the sale of Garmin’s StreetPilot c300 and c500 series in Europe, alleging that Garmin copied aspects of the TomTom GO design in its product line.

Yesterday the Dutch judge ruled that at first glance there are clear differences between Garmin’s StreetPilot c300 and c500 and TomTom’s Go models. For instance, Garmin’s c300 and c500 have an angular form, while TomTom’s Go has a round shape. The judge included drawings to underpin his views.

TomTom said it won’t appeal, but is counting on a procedure on the merits it has filed earlier on Garmin’s car navigation design. There are also several patent infringement cases between the two rivals.

Earlier this year, Garmin called for unspecified financial damages in its claim that TomTom is unlawfully using five US-patented Garmin technologies designed to “calculate which streets are important enough to a drivers’ route to be displayed”.

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Reuters: Mobile phone signals sent from traffic jams will enable a real-time travel information service, British telecoms group Vodafone and Dutch sat nav company TomTom said on Friday.

The service will be available in the Netherlands in the second half of 2007, using the Dutch Vodafone network.

Mobile phones continuously beam signals to their nearest base stations, which gives the network provider the approximate location of the phone.  TomTom will use this location information to establish if roads are congested, if and by how much the trip will be delayed, and if alternative routes can be suggested.

Mobile phone penetration is more than 100 percent in the Netherlands, meaning that every person carries one or more mobile phones.

“The service provides a much more accurate, faster and more detailed picture of the actual travel times than current solutions. The total investments are a fraction of the current, road side equipment based solutions,” TomTom said.

Unlike current systems, the TomTom system would monitor all roads.

“This is an industry first,” Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s chief executive officer said in a statement. “We are looking forward to signing further deals with leading operators across Europe and the U.S.,” he added.

TomTom sells more than half of all standalone car navigation devices in Europe. In the third quarter it sold 1.2 million of its route finders.

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TWICE: Cobra Electronics has entered an agreement to purchase Performance Products, a privately held, UK-based consumer electronics company for about €17 million plus two earnout payments totaling €12.5 million.Performance Products makes GPS devices and speed camera detection systems that alert drivers when they are approaching a roadside speed detection camera. The acquisition is expected to help Cobra enter the speed camera detection market in both the U.S. and Europe and to gain distribution for all its products in Europe.

Performance Products, a family owned business since 1995, was originally a radar detector supplier but transitioned into speed camera detection and GPS because radar detection is in the process of being outlawed in the U.K.

Cobra believes that some of Performance Products’ distribution in Europe will carry traditional Cobra products.

In the U.K., France and Denmark, Performance Products markets Snooper brand GPS devices that also offer speed camera detection when the user subscribes to a special service. The subscriber then gains access to Performance Products’ continually updated database of speed camera locations.

The use of speed cameras is growing exponentially in U.K and is beginning to proliferate in France and Denmark as well as the US where speed cameras are used in 161 cities, said Cobra president and CEO Jim Bazet.

In the US, Bazet said, “There’s no doubt in our minds that this is where detection is headed.”

Cobra SVP and CFO Michael Smith said that portable GPS devices and camera locators will likely merge in the future.

TomTom also offers a GPS model with speed camera detection in Europe, although Performance Products says it is the only company that updates its database 24-hours a day. “And thousands of these camera move around per week,” Bazet said.

Cobra said it currently has a six percent market share in GPS devices in the U.S., a 60 percent share in the radar detector and CB markets and close to a 30 percent share in 2-way radios.

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TWICE: Garmin has confirmed that Hyundai America will offer the Garmin nuvi 360 portable GPS through its 725 U.S. car dealerships.Hyundai car dealers starting this month will sell the nuvi at prices determined by the dealer and with the option to roll the purchase price into the financing of a car.

Garmin, which has about a 50 percent share of the portable GPS market, said that in less then a year the nuvi has become its most popular line.

The agreement with Hyundai is significant because it is Garmin’s first such U.S. arrangement with a car company and it allows the car dealers to offer state of the art portable GPS to consumers “when they are in a buying mood,” in the words of a Garmin spokesman, and at a price that can be negotiated along with the price of the car. “Customers see the Garmin kiosks at the dealership and it becomes really easy for them to say, let’s roll that into the deal,” he said.

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Akihabara News: Honda car drivers in Japan will be able to receive in real time the exact weather at their present location or at their destination. If you don’t think weather conditions at your current location are useful on a GPS (you could always put your hand outside the window for a real exact report), you may find interesting to know the roads or districts that are flooded, or cut-off by the snow.

Perhaps more interesting is that Honda will also offer a real SNS (Social Networking Service) which allows subscribers to provide some information about a precise location. For example, if you’ve had a bad experience in a restaurant, you can mark the place on your GPS and let the other users know.

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Dutch car navigation system maker TomTom will sue U.S. rival Garmin.  According to TomTom, Garmin has launched products which resemble too much of TomTom’s first navigation tools launched in 2004.

In February 2006 Garmin announced it would sue TomTom over patent infringement. The patent infringement lawsuit, which is not yet over, was filed with the Western District Court of Wisconsin and involves claims for alleged infringement of five Garmin patents in the United States.

Source: De Financiele Telegraaf

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A subsidiary company of Hitachi has launched development of a car navigation system that shows maps with less detail in a bid to make such systems easier for drivers to understand and follow.

The main feature of the technology is that it provides only the necessary information, such as key landmarks, in much the way people do when drawing a map for others.

For example, if the chosen route has the driver turning right at a particular intersection, buildings to the left of the intersection are for the most part unnecessary. The new system will omit much of this data when displaying the route, guiding drivers without overloading them with unnecessary information.

The Japan-based firm, Xanavi Informatics, plans to introduce the new technology as early as 2007 in car navigation systems it sells in Europe.

As car navigation systems have grown more popular, there has been a rise in accidents caused by drivers focusing on such systems and not paying attention to what is happening around them. The new technology is intended to help prevent such accidents.

Source: Asia Pulse Businesswire

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Bloomberg: Hitachi, Japan’s biggest electronics maker, will pay 55.7 billion yen (around €371 million) for a majority stake in car audio and navigation maker Clarion, helping boost their auto-related sales sixfold by 2011.

The company, which is already Clarion’s largest shareholder with a 14.4% stake, plans to buy more than half of the stock, Hitachi has said today in a statement.

Hitachi, which started a development venture with Clarion in December 2000, is targeting sales of 290 billion yen (€1.9 billion) at its car information systems unit by the year ending March 2011.

Tokyo-based Clarion last month slashed its profit forecast because of price declines and lower overseas sales of its car navigation systems.

Hitachi’s sales from car navigation equipment were 44.4 billion yen last year, about a quarter of Clarion’s 184.1 billion yen revenue. Hitachi bought its initial Clarion stake in 2004.

“They should have done this when they bought the minority stake two years ago and the indecision is typical of Hitachi management,” said Takeo Miyamoto, a Tokyo-based analyst at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

Clarion last month forecast net income will drop 78 percent to 1.3 billion yen, instead of an earlier projection for 3 billion yen, as sales rise 1 percent to 186 billion yen in the year ending March 2007.

The alliance with Hitachi would help Clarion speed up development, cost cuts and give the company the scale necessary to compete globally, Clarion President Tatsuhiko Izumi said today at the joint Tokyo press briefing.

“Carmakers are trying to squeeze in more and more devices,” said John Yang, an analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research in Tokyo.  “It used to be just a DVD player, now it’s a car navi with a hard disk.”

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