Google announced on their Lat Lon Blog that Google Maps for Android now works when it’s disconnected from the internet. Users can select and save a region of a map from more than 150 countries for use offline.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski joined major police department chiefs, including New York City Police Commissioner Raymond E. Kelly, Philadelphia Police Department Commissioner Charles Ramsey, Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier, Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, wireless carriers, and Senator Chuck Schumer to announce new initiatives to combat cell phone and data theft.
Smartphones are taking over the world, and not just modern industrialized societies. A Broadcom executive predicted today at […]
The 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show is underway. The Ford Evos concept car is having its debut and overtakes the company’s Sync offering, with a high level of social networking and connectivity features. A departure from the Sync approach of vehicles as smartphones on wheels, this plug-in hybrid is designed to always be connected to the cloud. Some of the distractibility found in the Sync has been diminished. The driver’s “personal cloud” makes automatic adjustments to music, temperature, traffic checks, and navigation that reflect learned personal choices of the driver and her schedule. Hooking a car up to the cloud comes with significant risks. Moving from stand-alone isolated in-vehicle systems to the connected network world carries the threat of being hacked and exposed to viruses. iSec researchers demonstrated unlocking and starting a car by sending text messages to its alarm system. The problem, however, is much broader than having a car stolen.
It is a significant first, an iconic moment, a big deal. You will want to remember where you were when you heard that smartphones started to outsell personal computers. According to a report by market research company IDC, consumer electronics makers shipped 100.9 million smartphones worldwide in the last three months of 2010, an 87 percent jump from a year earlier. PC shipments didn’t do as well, edging up just three percent to 92.1 million.
At the opposite end of this book, my esteemed colleague Eric Gakstatter gives you his Top Five news stories of the recently passed year, from a system point of view. Spend five minutes here in this column, and I’ll toss up the Top Ten for GNSS business, as reported in this magazine. Not the biggest money deals or revenue generators, at least not in the short term. But the most significant in terms of breaking new ground, pushing out frontiers, integrating with other technologies — the modes through which industry grows and prospers.
From a distance, the Garmin-Asus partnership to produce GPS-enabled smartphones looked pretty good — particularly during the market erosion for portable navigation devices. However, published reports indicate that the companies will not renew their partnership in January 2011. Switzerland-based Garmin and its Dutch competitor TomTom have seen steeply declining sales for personal navigation devices (PNDs) since the high point of the market two years ago, industry observers say.
As today’s handsets and consumer devices become more sophisticated, manufacturers continue to incorporate more and more functionality into a small and sleek form factor. Today’s range of smartphones incorporate voice and data transceivers, GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cameras, music, touchscreen interfaces, compasses, motion sensors, cameras, storage cards, and many other technologies. Free turn-by-turn navigation services, such as offered on Google Android phones and iPhones, have created a compelling reason for many of us to own a GPS-equipped smartphone.
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