Bendable Media

Even though Nokia foresaw a huge market for GPS services on mobile phones when it bought Chicago digital mapmaker Navteq in late 2007 for $8.1 billion, I’m pretty confident it didn’t plan on offering free turn-by-turn driving directions on Nokia phones. At least not so soon.

Nokia offers free turn-by-turn GPS directions on its smartphones

But that’s exactly what Nokia announced Thursday, saying 10 of its smartphones can now operate a GPS-based mapping service at no charge. Predictably, the stock prices for Garmin and TomTom — the top makers of stand-alone, dashboard-mounted GPS units — fell sharply.

Those stock prices dropped hard in Oct. 2009 as well, when Google grievously wounded the stand-alone GPS market with the launch of the Motorola Droid, which runs on Google’s Android software platform and is sold by Verizon Wireless. The service is called Google Maps Navigation, and the Droid was the first phone to offer its free turn-by-turn driving directions. By the end of 2010, I would guess at least 20 mobile phones and perhaps 50 or more, will offer such a service — for free.

Whether or not Nokia’s move to offer free mapping on its smartphones — the product is called Ovi Maps — will help Nokia stop its share slide (can you say iPhone?) remains to be seen. But it’s undeniable that this trend will continue, and reach more and more smartphones.

“By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones, we quickly became the biggest camera maker in the world,” Anssi Vanjoki, a Nokia executive, told the New York Times. “The aim of the new new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation.”

You can download paid apps for your iPhone, too, but that will probably migrate to free eventually. TomTom even sells an iPhone app for $79 (it launched 3 months ago for $99).

There is a key problem with using a phone-based GPS system in your car: it will suck the battery dry within 3 hours. Therefore, you will likely need accessories to keep the phone charged will you drive. But that costs $20, not the $200 it typically costs for a stand-alone GPS unit.

Finally, it didn’t take a genius to see this coming, even before Nokia bought Navteq. Yet despite the advances in mobile software Google displayed in October and Nokia now offers, there’s another critical reason mapping is moving rapidly to the phone: government regulations.

Here’s an excerpt from a Chicago Tribune Tech Buzz column I wrote in Feb. 2007:

Last week, as I read about a parade of mobile phone-based navigation debuts at a European trade show, that thought turned into pessimism for Garmin, TomTom, Chicago’s Cobra Electronics and other makers of stand-alone global positioning systems.

In the short term, you will see healthy market gains, such as Garmin’s fourth-quarter performance, released last week, showing earnings more than doubled. Sales of stand-alone units from all makers are expected to double this year.

But long term, the momentum will swing to the mobile phone-makers, thanks, in part, to an unlikely marketing partner: the federal government.

Due to the recently enacted e-911 rules that say mobile-phone users must be able to be located by police or fire departments in case of an emergency, there are millions of phones in the United States that contain GPS chips.

Even though few of those phones take advantage of their devices’ GPS DNA so far, that’s rapidly changing.

As people shop for new phones when service contracts expire, they will see phones with bigger and brighter screens, ideal for GPS.

As we near Feb. 2010, that momentum has arrived.

Related Posts, Bendable Gadgets:

• The HTC Incredible, is, well, pretty sweet
• Too much traffic for dashboard-mounted GPS units
• Apple’s iPhone 4 won’t slow Google’s Android momentum