Filed at 9:11 a.m. ET
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Late for the next appointment? You'll no longer have the excuse of having taken a wrong turn -- if you have a handheld computer with the latest navigation software, that is.
Satellite navigation -- once a $3,000 luxury for yachtsmen, big-rig truckers and back-country campers -- has dropped in price and grown in portability, having found its way into Palm and Pocket PC handheld computers.
Global positioning systems (GPS), as these location-finding devices are called, are also popping up in the latest generation of mobile phones.
``It (navigation) is a universal problem. You want to go from A to B and you don't know where B is. Navigation has been around for 10 years, but it used to be expensive,'' says Harold Goddijn, chief executive of TomTom, one of the larger vendors of Pocket PC-based navigation software.
Netherlands-based TomTom and rivals such as Garmin, Nexian, Destinator, Pharos, Maptech and NavMan are leaders in the emerging field of location-finding hardware and software. They target the 13-million-a-year handheld computer market, and are expecting to sell 445 million mobile phones this year.
Prices start at just over $100 for the GPS receiver to hook onto a handheld. Mapping software runs another $100 to $200. TomTom, for example, charges $350 for a receiver, software, a charger and car cradle. GPS units typically are small, the size of a box of mints, and can be installed on a car dashboard.
Over the last 18 months, some vendors introduced handheld computer software that works with satellite positioning information. The software, developed for military use, previously ran mainly on dedicated location-finding devices.
Now the industry is gearing up for a second generation of devices that bring navigation to the even bigger market for wireless phones, where GPS will soon be a standard feature.
The location-finding market is still small, with four million stand-alone units expected to be sold in the United States and Europe this year. The total number of cars with onboard navigation systems is estimated at 11 million worldwide, according to research by Standard & Poor's and Tele Atlas (TATL.DE), an Israeli mapping firm.
In Japan, more than half of all new cars come with a navigation system fitted in the factory, whereas in Europe and the United States the number is only one in every nine.
MUCH BIGGER MARKET
The potential market is much bigger than that. This year some 55 million cars will be sold worldwide.
Many mobile phone operators are already testing systems.
``Mobile operators believe navigation will be a mass market service for everybody to use. They want to make it affordable,'' says Boaz Schlesinger, marketing executive at Telmap, a navigation software company based in Herzlia, Israel.
Navigation was first commercially embraced in sailing and yachting, where the price of a positioning system was dwarfed by the price of the boat. The investment was also outweighed by the potential damage of sailing into a sandbar.
This history still shows in the line-up of players.
The navigation software and hardware market is a blend of companies rooted in marine electronics, car entertainment and handheld software, each focusing on a different consumer group. Most U.S. luxury cars now come equipped with such systems.
Marine navigation software maker Maptech from Massachusetts offers detailed maps for sailors and hikers. Satellite information pinpoints the user's position on the slope or in relation to the shore, and projects it on a detailed map.
Established car entertainment companies like VDO Dayton and Bosch Blaupunkt in Germany, and Japan's Alpine (6770.T) and Pioneer (6773.T) offer the pricey routing systems often found in motor homes, trucks and BMW, Lexus and Mercedes sedans.
The new group of portable navigation makers address the much larger market of occasional users who do not spend nearly as much time in cars or boats.
Handheld devices now offer almost all the features of the expensive systems, including three-dimensional images, voice instructions, the most direct route to a destination as well as the location of gas stations and fast-food shops.
The handheld software makers continue to improve their software, which can be downloaded to a PC and imported into the portable device during the next synchronization. Improvements will include more points of interest, options to choose backroads or picturesque detours and ways around traffic jams.
Importing improvements is an advantage over traditional car navigation systems that are based on CD-ROMs or DVDs.
A major drawback, however, is that most handheld computers have limited memory. Despite heavy data compression, TomTom's map of France -- 210,000 sq. miles, or about four-fifths the size of Texas -- will not fit onto the 64 megabytes of computer memory that comes standard with most Pocket PCs.
Consumers need to buy extra data storage to use the service, something that's not possible on most mobile phones.
This limitation is why Israel's Telmap downloads just the immediate route, calculating directions on a central computer.
It then sends the 'corridor' travel route to a mobile phone or other map-ready device, making it ideal for memory-light products like cell phones.
