“TomTom has in fact produced real-time navigation software for the iPhone, according to one of the company’s French representatives,” MacNN reports.
“Yann Lafargue denies allegations from other sources, which first said that Apple’s SDK license forbids real-time navigation, and then that TomTom itself had no internal prototypes. ‘Since the SDK became available,’ Lafargue observes, ‘some of our engineers tried to put Navigator on the iPhone. And the first tests showed that it worked well for the most part,'” MacNN reports.
“Regarding the SDK, Lafargue believes that Apple does not have the intention of blocking third-party companies from competing in iPhone navigation. The company ‘must simply try to protect itself,’ he says,” MacNN reports.
More info and links here.
Confirmed, then denied, then confirmed again… Let’s just wait and see.
MDN, what has been going on with your front page? While I have to say I dont’ mind the spartan look (loads fast), you must be bleeding money without all that ad revenue from the page!
Do these GPS companies work with OSX? I haven’t checked in a while but I remember hearing how they, at least in the past, only worked with Windows and not OSX.
Where is that verbiage in the SDK kit that states you cannot develop this type of software with the iPhone’s GPS?
NM
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@TomTom. If you can’t beat ’em
Option A: Join them!
Option B: Wallow in Self Pity/Self Loathing
Option C: Become friends with Rob Enderle*
* I can never remember how to spell that guy’s name. I guess it’s the little things that show how much you care.
My Garmin gets all it’s updates through OSX and my unit works perfectly with it.
The killer app for the iPhone is the GPS.
The other features let us do the same things but faster – the location feature lets developers do new things. The TomTom itself blows your mind re what it can do beyond normal navigation (iPod integration, 3D mapping, community voices, speech of street names, view location of friends on trips, downloadable sets of points-of-interest, alternative routes due to traffic, etc).
I have CoPilot Live on my WM phone and it is slow, inaccurate, buggy interface, feature poor, just like Windows. I think in a few years we will all have multiple GPS devices, and I hope the TomTom software will be on all of them.
@Halapeño
So does my Tom Tom.
I work at tomtom hq and can confirm that the rumor is true. Moreover, the two founders of tomtom both have iPhones since the very beginning. Tomtom is quite happy to see its software and technologies used a many devices. While garmin focuses on hw; tomtom puts its energy on services. It will take a few years before navigation on an iPhone is as good as on a GO.
Will the new iPhone work with my compass and sextant?
You had to see this coming.
There are a lot of mobile devices that will be tossed once their applications are ported to the iPhone.
Tomtom is a great product, if they can innovate the iphone then it’ll be better for the iPhone
Frankly, I’m looking for “sky caddie” on my phone. (Or soon to be phone if the above becomes available.)
can’t wait to put my Garmin on fleaBay when the 3G iPhone comes out and some good GPS software is sold for it. Gotta love convergence devices… fewer cables, fewer batteries to replace, and fewer things to shlep around when on business trips.
“Can you imagine trying to locate a beowulf cluster with one of these?”
Quote Predrag:
“MDN, what has been going on with your front page? While I have to say I dont’ mind the spartan look (loads fast), you must be bleeding money without all that ad revenue from the page!”
Yeah, you need to get it going. Without you ads Obama might not become president.
TomTom has it’s fair share of problems too, the most stupid of which is to have no facility to show altitude. Altitude is something that GPS is very good at, yet TomTom in it’s wisdom won’t let us have it, not even as an option. The problem with all non-GPS altimiters is that unless they are set to barometric pressure several times a day, they are very innacurate.
TomTom service is usually appalling and you have to wonder at some of the just plain dumb things they design on their hardware.
I use TomTom all the time on a Treo 700P. I depend on it and it works great. I hope TomTom makes a version for iPhone.