Full FeedSygic bringing turn by turn GPS to the iPhone
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona usually means a quiet time for Apple. But even with no presence at the event, the iPhone still manages to creep its way in. Sygic, a company that develops GPS applications for smartphones and PDAs promised a demonstration of their software on the iPhone at MWC. They didn’t let us down, and so, on the TeleAtlas stand, they demonstrated the application on an iPhone 3G for the first time.
The software uses TeleAtlas maps with turn by turn directions and voice prompts. The maps themselves will be stored locally on the iPhone, so wherever you’re traveling, you’ll never loose sight of your destination. It will also feature points of interests, and support multiple counties. I expect this will cover America, most (if not all) of Europe and possibly China. Being English, I would definitely like to see this available for the UK App Store.
Sygic have said they will release the application to Apple’s App Store and see what happens. They’re not 100% sure that Apple will approve the application, for reasons around the iPhone SDK. Within the contracting document, it states that “Applications may not be designed or marketed for real time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles or aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.” Hopefully, they will find a way to bypass this ruling; it’s about time there was a true GPS application available.
Do you think Apple will approve Sygic’s application? Or have they got their own GPS app up their sleeve? Give us your views below in the comments.
Via [AppleInsider]
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I don’t understand why the built in Maps App doesn’t automatically move to the next direction prompt when you are in range on it’s location. It’s hardly a difficult funcion to implement and would be much safer than trying to determine when a purple line moves off a blue road on motorways. There are some very strange ommisions in The iPhone OS (copy paste copy paste copy paste come on!)
on February 19, 2009 at 08:30 AM - LINKI agree, Rob. Why it can list the route, actually tell you where you are in real-time, but not put the two together to update the route directions, is beyond me. When you become within say, 50 yards of a junction, update it. From there, it wouldn’t be very hard to add in a voice command at the same time.
The basic workings are there, but for some reason, they just haven’t put 2 and 2 together yet. Whether they allow this application into the App Store, and on what grounds they provide, it may show some light as to whether they have plans of their own to add these features into Maps.
on February 19, 2009 at 08:37 AM - LINKSygic is already at App Store from today with the Australia&New; Zealand package, and South East Asia, too :-) For Europe and US&Canada; we will probably need to wait some more…
on June 18, 2009 at 12:31 PM - LINK