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| GPS at CES 2006 |
4. What's new - "made in Taïwan"
When mobile road navigation systems appeared in 2002 they relied on a PDA+GPS combos, with most of the receivers being designed and manufactured in Taïwan, but the rise of the AIO's has somewhat changed the rules as they require a strong and comprehensive setup, hardware+software+distribution, which is difficult to implement from Taïwan or Korea. The CES gave us a chance to catch up with manufacturers previously met at CeBIT and at Computex in past years :
Fine Digital
A newcomer from Korea, Fine Digital made a splash for Thanksgiving when they became available at Best Buy with the FineDrive 400 at a very competitive price. They currently use the Intellinav software platform but were also showing the FineDrive 410 that runs Navigon 5.
Fortuna
A well known brand among GPS fans thanks to their popular GPSmart and ClipOn models released in 2003, but who had been fairly quiet over the past year. They were working on a full range of AIOs and at CES they premiered the 550 and 600 that joined the 100 and 2000 seen at the CeBIT 2005 show. I recently tested the Medion PNA350 and was surprised to see it was running the Fortuna iNav500 GPS firmware, and it does indeed look like the 550, a good win for Fortuna as Medion are among the top sellers of AIOs in Europe. The Prymenav software they were showing at CeBIT seems to be out of the picture at this point as it has apparently not been completed.
Globalsat
Among the GPS manufacturers out of Taïwan at the CES 2006 show, Globalsat certainly had the most impressive display of new GPS devices, new bluetooth GPS receivers, the diminutive BT-358, but also a new AIO (All in One) the GV-201, a GPS watch, the GH-601, and a GPS/GSM tracker, the TR-101. Their booth was staffed both by members of the Globalsat Taïwan team, led by Prince, and by members of the USGlobalsat team, led by Alex. More details below and in this thread of the forums.
Holux
After a fairly quiet year in 2005, past the initial announcements, Holux were among the rare GPS manufacturers at CES with Globalsat to introduce new models for PDA and PCs, others like Fortuna now focusing on AIO's. While the GPSlim238 has a fairly classic look, the GPSlim 237 and GPSlim239 prototypes break some new ground with their unique format, pen for the former and golf ball for the latter.
Leadtek
While they broke a lot of new ground GPSwise with the first "mouse" GPS, the 9831, in 2001, or the first SiRFIII GPS, the 9553, in 2004, Leadtek have been less active of late, as they had to regroup after their GPS director left for TomTom in early 2005. They were only showing the AIO seen at CeBIT and at CES, but have been working on interesting OEM projects such as the Alpine Blackbird and are still going strong on the OEM module business with smaller and cheaper SiRF based chips.
Polstar/Deluo
Polstar and Deluo were sharing a booth on the Hilton exhibition site. Their BT-111 Blueooth GPS (the Deluo GPS Lite) became quite popular in 2005 thanks to its low price, but it relied on the low performance Sony v2 chipset. Since then, Sony have released a more powerful v3 (tested here) with vastly improved performance. In spite of that, Polstar will now be offering SiRFstarIII version of their GPS receivers, Bluetooth GPS and the RoadMentor AIO.
Rikaline
Rikaline were showing some new GPS receivers for PDAs and PCs as well as some AIO and GPS watch concepts.
Royaltek
Not easy to find Royaltek who had a booth in the remote Sands Exhibition Halls. The focus at Royaltek this year is on RDS/TMC, with the RTA-1000 "mouse" receiver and an RDS/TMC version of the Empus GPS PDA.
Other Manufacturers
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