Is the GPS device now a PDA?
Submitted by Keith Shaw on Thu, 05/31/2007 - 2:38pm.
A couple of weeks ago Gartner came out with a report that said PDA sales were up in Q1 2007, breaking the cycle of a downward trend in this category. However, digging deeper into the details of how they categorized PDAs was an interesting tidbit – Global Positioning System (GPS) device manufacturer Mio Technology was among the companies classified as PDA.
The portable navigation device is no longer just a device that sits in your car to give you driving directions, more features and abilities are being added that turn them more into portable computers (for lack of a better word), and maybe the PDA designation by Gartner is appropriate.
Witness, for example, today's announcement by Harman Kardon about its new Guide + Play GPS-300 (GPS-500, the older model, pictured). In addition to standard GPS functionality, the GPS-300 includes a digital music player with integrated MP3/WMA support and a 4-inch widescreen touchscreen display. The $300 device (available in June at this site) can play music and provide navigation simultaneously, and the device can store up to 2GB of music internally, and 4GB of music loaded on a SD card.
I wonder if this means that GPS devices will now have to be considered in the category of portable music player as well.
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