As Morts already mentioned, with the new Verizon Droid launch, Google has announced a new mobile maps feature: Navigation.

No, I’m not talking about using Google Maps to calculate driving directions on your phone. I mean real bona-fide location aware turn-by-turn spoken directions that rival and even surpass the features of high-end standalone GPS navigation units.
Using your phone instead of a standard GPS navigation system on your phone isn’t new- Old-school smartphone owners (Palm & Windows Mobile) have had access to commercial software from Garmin and Tom Tom for years. If you don’t want to store maps on your phone, or just have a simple feature phone, many carriers licensed Telenav software for a nominal charge to your bill.

What’s interesting here, however, is that Google is offering this for free. From Verizon. Yeah. Verizon is OK with letting Google give you something without them getting paid for it.
This really could be the start of a new Verizon.
The question is, will Google make this available for other GPS-enabled platforms as well? What about the iPhone or Windows Mobile? Or even Blackberry?

Now, before I sound too excited and ahead of myself, let’s not forget that Bing! mobile does this as well, and is also offered for free (as long as you have unlimited data) on some smartphone platforms such as Windows Mobile. Bing even offers a similar voice-recognition feature for speaking your destination. However, the interface is harder to navigate and it doesn’t speak the directions as it follows you. It looks like Google has taken all the good of Bing’s navigation features, and combined it with everything good in a standalone navigation package, and slapped on some killer features that only Google can get away with for free.

The question on my mind, however, is whether or not Google will be releasing this for all the other mobile platforms that currently have Google Maps supported. Remember all the fuss and delays Tom Tom had trying to push the iPhone navigation package?

Imagine for a moment that Google releases their nav system for iPhone, for free, before Tom Tom can break even on their sales. Wow. Talk about game changer.

Full Google press release here.

UPDATE: According to Engadgetmobile.com, Tom Tom and Garmin stock prices are plummeting!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Android, GPS, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.