Published: 10th February 2008 | Author: The Times
The new handsets, designed to help people find their way on foot around a maze of city streets and locate points of interest (POIs), could do for the street map what the likes of TomTom did for the humble paper road atlas.
And it won’t mean carting around yet another bulky bit of kit because the navigation software can come on a mobile phone – the item we are now least likely to leave home without, according to a recent survey.
This week Garmin, the world’s leading sat nav manufacturer, will unveil its Nüvifone – the first dedicated sat nav phone for pedestrians. It combines all the usual mobile phone functions with the ability, so its maker claims, to navigate you painlessly – and without the need to accost random strangers for directions – from A to B.
The phone has a 3.5in matt touchscreen and contains a GPS (global positioning system) receiver – just like an in-car sat nav system – that can find your exact location to within a few yards (provided you are outdoors and it can pick up a signal from the satellites). It will come with the option of European or North American mapping.
Switching to “pedestrian mode” (the Nüvifone can also be used in a car) will tell the sat nav to disregard one-way systems and allow it to direct you down streets a vehicle cannot enter. Type in the address or postcode of the place you want to get to and the device will calculate the shortest route and then guide you there. Want to get to Covent Garden? Try the database of POIs and the system should be able to tell you exactly where you are, then give you real-time, street-by-street directions as you walk along, either via directional arrows on a 2-D or 3-D map on the screen, or using voice commands via the phone’s in-built speaker or a Bluetooth headset. That’s the theory.
Sat nav has already proved to be an invaluable tool for motorists, but does the same technology translate to the pavement? The Sunday Times was given a sneak look at the Nüvifone before it goes on show in Barcelona this week, but the manufacturer was unwilling to let us test it before its grand unveiling.
Other attempts at pedestrian sat navs have proved far from flawless. The Nokia N92 and MDA Vario III smartphones claim to offer a fully fledged pedestrian sat nav function, but in tests both devices were woefully unreliable when used on foot.
A big stumbling block for pedestrian sat nav is that the GPS locator needs a clear line of sight to the satellites overhead, and it struggled when flanked by tall buildings. Also, much of the reliability of any sat nav comes from the way it calculates your location based on your movement in mainly straight lines. As a pedestrian this is more erratic, so the device is less able to keep track. The sat nav function also eats battery life, and when we tested the Nokia in central London it gave up the ghost in the middle of its unnecessarily convoluted directions to our destination.
The Apple iPhone is no better, however. It has no GPS receiver, can find your location only in relation to the position of the nearest mobile phone mast or Wi-Fi hotspot, and can’t offer turn-by-turn directions or figure out which way you’re facing.
With time these problems should be ironed out, and most big consumer electronic manufacturers are working on new personal navigation devices. If it lives up to its hype the Nüvifone, which goes on sale in the autumn, should already be streets ahead of the competition and pointing the way to the future of navigation. For now, though, best tape your old A to Z back together one more time.
