GPS becomes affordable

Want a GPS for your car? Read this first

Well it seems the high tech world of GPS has indeed become a low cost reality. Read this article.

http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/jan/12gps.htm.

No doubt with this (as mentioned in the article) the premium car makers would also be forced to bring the prices of their cars to a certain extent. 2008 does definitely look really good for the Indian Auto industry.

Unless you have money to burn, dont go for GPS yet.  Our country is yet to even have a decent set of well updated detailed printed road maps like you get in other countries - forget the GPS.

The problem is the government cartology department is pretty lousy in this area - in all other countries, it is this department that took the lead and then went private.  

In India, it is the small players who are now in the market with their devices - which are sure not to perform as needed with their low volumes.

Ganesh your view is correct. This article only goes to show how the components industry is picking up momentum. I believe this article also shows that high end gadgets need not be the forte of the high end cars from top end manufacturers.

So when we talk about "Blue & Me" from Fiat & Microsoft collaboration we should also understand that this is just another implementatin of Bluetooth technology. And the same can be replicated in any of the cars. I think currently this same technology is available in Indigo XL Grand. Like Auto transmission was a big deal ininitially. Now ofcourse we have WagonR, Xing etc vehicles also sporting the AT trims.

In this sense i mentioned that PREMIUM itself would be redefined over a period of time.

Bhushan

Atleast my hope is that these facilities should become affordable for everyone and yes these should be useful too. This effort is just a start.

I stay in Bangalore and my feelking is that roads in cities are more unpredictable than the highway ones. Atleast the highway directions do not change so often. For people who are travelling long, this could be useful to maintain their direction. So many time we are taken for a ride when we are in a new city. This may be intentional / unintentional. But a navigation system would always help. Atelast we could plan better having more information with us. And if the same information is available in the language of our choice, wouldn't that be great?

In cities i found the traffic information given by the popular radio channels about traffic jams, extremely useful many times. Lets see how the usage of GPS facility develops.

Bhushan

I have the Mapmyindia AMAX navigator which is quite affordable about 12K.

It has voice instructions and is quite accurate.

Suppose you get lost some where just press the "Take me home" button and the navigator will guide you to your home.

Besides this the POIs on the way are also indicated.

Mapmyindia is perhaps the most comprehensive and affordable GPS navigator in India today.

There a number of other uses also like ETA(Estimated Arrival Time),Total distance between 2 places,shortest/fastest/optimised route etc

Here is my story.....

I have Nokia N82 with GPS and Nokia maps. Good for all metro cities(where I dont need it much ) but conks off beyond NCR region(where I desperately need it ) cause the maps are not there. And I end up using Google Maps on my N82 as a Navigation software. Pretty crude but gets the work done when Nokia has vanished long time back!

Moreover, I have a chinese 7 inch Double Din GPS device with Win CE 5 and for the last one year I am not able to find the India specific maps till now.  Can anyone help me with this?

You can contact to Satguide.in, i think they will support you.  but contact on your own risk,  might be the unit stop working.  Generally Chinese products are unlocked and it is easy to install maps through external SD Card.  Satguide maps are available in 1 k only. it is worth to buy.

Mapmyindia is good i think (as offering map data to yahoo.in) but expensive.

Best of Luck.