News comes from Amsterdam today regarding Dutch GPS system company TomTom, as they team up with Google to provide greater utility in TomTom’s portable GPS devices. TomTom’s navigation devices are probably familiar to you; if you don’t have one in your car, you’ve probably been subjected to one of their advertisements.
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For once, the press release copy isn’t exaggerating. The cooperation between Google and TomTom is actually a major step for TomTom, and GPS navigation as a whole. Live business data and points of interest from the Google business listings as well as certain crowd-sourced Google Maps data for points of interest will be available via Internet capable TomTom devices.
For now, it looks like the devices will function in a sync-up capacity, if I’m reading properly between the lines on the marketing verbiage. You then take the device mobile, and are able to either pre-plan driving routes based on points of interests or businesses, or have relevant sites pop up as you drive past.
As these systems progress, wouldn’t it be great if it had the always on capability, and you could load a Google Earth filter and see new points of interest pop up as they were created? We probably won’t see such functionality this time around, but I imagine it isn’t too many generations down the line.
