Carphone launches dirt cheap sat nav

IN THE UK, leading mobile phone distributor, Carphone Warehouse, has just launched Myphone Satnav which it reckons is the country's most aggressively priced offering at a mere £39.99.

The product is actually sourced from a German company, Jentro which claims the client software will work on just about any Java enabled mobile phone there is. Although it needs Bluetooth, too.

That's a huge potential market among existing mobile phone subscribers. So how come it's so cheap? The answer is that you don't get any maps with that price.

On top of £40, purchasers need to pay another £.499 per month to get the maps for a single month. Or £49.99 for a year's supply of maps.

The catch is that you have to download the maps from Jentro's servers. The company claims that it will cost between five and ten pence per map to do so, although it's impossible to give an exact figure.

Still, it's an attractive option for those who don't want to fork out hundreds of pounds for the likes of a dedicated TomTom satellite navigation unit.

Myphone Satnav comes with a standalone GPS receiver which communicates with the handset via Bluetooth. It's therefore not as convenient as the latest GPS enabled handsets for Nokia like the N95 and the 6110.

According to market watcher, Frost & Sullivan, expected sales of sat-nav devices in 2006 were around 525,000 with this figure predicted to grow to 16.7 million units by 2012.

80 per cent of sat-nav sales are going through phone people like the Carphone Warehouse along with their associated web site sales. Top suppliers include Tomtom, Navman, Navigon and Garmin. µ