sourceGPS.com  

There’s been a lot of rumors going around that “turn by turn” navigational software will become available for the iPhone very soon - but so far everything is still rumors.

The Dutch company TomTom says they are coming out with turn by turn software for the iPhone but no date or details have been released so far. While TomTom makes great navigational software it’s all wait and see when it comes to TomTom living up to Apple Style and I’d give Garmin a better kick at being able to develop a user interface that still “feels like an iPhone”.

I may be a little bit biased here but what I would really like to see is behemoth Google step up to the plate and develop a navigational system that works with Google Earth. For them to do this they’d have to be making some big changes though and I’m sure they’re much too busy on other projects to be working on a little one like this.

As a consumer all we can do is wait for it. If you ask me - we’ve already been waiting WAY too long!

On July 11, 2008 TWENTY ONE countries are going to have access to one of the most revolutionary electronic devices to ever hit the electronic marketplace.

Apple will release the long awaited iPhone 2 in Austrailia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and yes… even in THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

It must have taken a lot of pushing, shoving and forcing to pack all the features of the iPhone into just 4.7 ounces (133 grams) of pure technological horsepower.

The iPhone comes with 8 gigs of storage space (16 gigs if you want to go for the high end model) a 3-1/2 inch widescreen display (480×320 @ 163ppi), a 2 megapixel camera that supports Geotagging, Bluetooth, internal (more…)

Since Macintosh has been scraping together more and more of the computer market share with every passing day I thought that I’d check out just which GPS manufacturers were willing to recognize the aggressively rising popularity in the OS X operating system.

My goal was not to find out which GPS devices could with a whole bunch of tweaking and 3rd party software possibly be hooked up to a Mac and have some type of support. I wanted to see which manufacturers put the time in to produce their own software that slips right into the system without any fiddling around.

This OEM type of support for a less popular operating system really represents who’s working hard to keep their market share and their users happy.

The results were no less than what I expected with OEM support for Mac OS X on TomTom and Garmin devices and with Magellan and Mio being left out in the cold totally unsupported.

Garmin devices have a small, powerful suite of software to use - all beautifully integrated with the Mac operating system. Bobcat, MapInstall, POI Loader, Connect and the Communicator Plugin for other software and services like Google Maps, Mapquest and Geocaching.com allow you to do everything you’d expect and more from your Garmin GPS device and a Mac based system. All their OS X software is available on the Garmin Mac OS X Software Page.

Although TomTom devices also have OEM support for Mac OS X the software seems to be a bit more of a storefront to help them sell more services to you. The TomTom software however is fully functional and allows you to do all the things you need to do with your device like adding points of interest, doing backups, changing voices and updating your maps.

With the software storefront you can also purchase subscriptions to their ’safety camera’ updating service and their traffic service - both of which will for sure save you time and money.

You can download their Mac OS X software from the TomTom Plus Services web site.

Not that it’s a super-surprise to me - but Magellan doesn’t have OEM support for Mac OS X and the Magellan devices.

You can see from my interaction with the Magellan uber-cool Ask Maggie Web Support System that no Mac software support is available.

I do find it kind of funny though that Maggie decided to ask me if the ’solution’ provided was helpful or not. Even though Maggie ever so thoughtfully provided a link to the front page of the Apple web site I’m going to have to say “No her SOLUTION was not very helpful”.

Mio was the least supported - Yes… even less than Magellan without even confirmation in a search on their web site that Mac support was not available.

With the type of support that Garmin and TomTom offer their users you can see why they are the real front-runners in the GPS market. You can expect them to hold on to this position because they’re going to work hard on the development of their devices to expand their user-base and keep you happy.