TomTom Unveiled New PND and more Affordable Real-Time Services
TomTom Unveiled New PND and more Affordable Real-Time Services
During a special event in Amsterdam today, TomTom unveiled the TomTom GO Live 1000, a new flagship product from the Dutch navigation provider with new software, expanded and more affordable connected services.
Coming this summer in Europe (for an unknown price), this new device will bring HD traffic and real-time speedcam information to 16 European countries (including roaming) and the rest of the connected services – weather, local search, etc. – to 33 countries. In addition the first year of service will be free and following years will cost less than €50 instead of €9.95 per month for the existing connected services.
The SIM cards will continue to be provided by wireless operator Vodafone, a long term partner of TomTom for connectivity and HD Traffic.
“The aim is to have 80 percent connected devices on the road”, said Corinne Vigreux, Managing director of the TomTom PND business. At the present time the company only has 700,000 connected devices in use (paying customers and trial period alltogether) and a renewal rate of only 25 to 30 percent after the first three months of free of service.
Peter Geelen, TomTom
Peter Geelen, TomTom
New software
The new software, that has been largely redesigned, offers many features, among them “instant route planning” that can calculate in 6 seconds a 20 hours route across Europe.
The software is also context sensitive with buttons appearing and disappearing from the menu according to the context – for example “re-route” does not appear when the route has not yet been calculated.
At the hardware level, the TomTom GO Live 1000 has a capacitive touch screen and a custom-built Broadcom GPS chipset.
Opening up connected services
On the back-end side, TomTom also redesigned its platform for rich content delivery. While nothing has been formally announced yet at the Amsterdam event, TomTom founder and user interface director Peter Geelen, showed up Zagat content, Wikipedia articles and traffic webcam feeds integrated into the PND software.
The software of this new device is based on Webkit technology, “making it future proof”, he said.
While we do not know how and when third party contents and services will be available, it is clear that TomTom wants to bring an “App Store flavor” to their connected devices in the future.
"The whole idea is to be able to offer, local, personalized content to our customers", added Corinne Vigreux.
Tuesday April 27, 2010
Ludovic Privat