Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) will still compete with smartphones for market share in the short-term. However, in the long-term, the increasingly comprehensive functionality of the smartphone, together with its ability to cater to consumers’ needs beyond simply mapping and navigation, is set to overtake PNDs.

In November 2010, GfK carried out some research which revealed that 70% of smartphone owners in the UK, Germany and France preferred to use a dedicated PND for in-car navigation rather than their smartphone. Despite this, smartphones continue to offer increasingly sophisticated mapping, navigation and location-based services – so how has this affected the PND market?

Certainly, the navigation market is not yet saturated. GfK surveyed over 1,800 respondents in the UK and the US in September 2011 and results showed that 37% owned neither a smartphone nor any kind of PND. At the other end of the spectrum, just under a fifth of respondents owned both a portable PND and a smartphone. Interestingly, owning a PND does not reduce the usage of location-based services on smartphones  - of those who own both, 91% use their smartphone for some form of mapping, navigation or location-based service.

Smartphones are competing with dedicated personal navigation devices (PNDs) for market share but recent research shows that PNDs are still preferred for in-car navigation. Smartphones can begin to win more market share by improving their user experience and integrating popular social networking and location based services.

Usage of mobile mapping and navigation services is booming. Almost a year ago Nokia announced that its mobile navigation service, Ovi Maps, would be free with a compatible Nokia handset. In the first week alone the service had been downloaded over 1.4 million times. According to Wikipedia Ovi Maps is now available in 74 countries and in 46 different languages. Similarly, Google now offers its mobile navigation services in 12 countries and it has proved a big hit with Google Android smartphone owners. Consequently, in the space of a couple of years the PND market has changed dramatically, with global in car satellite navigation providers such as TomTom and Garmin facing fresh competition from the all gadget devouring smartphone.

With the rapid growth of smartphone ownership over the last couple of years, it was inevitable that people in the UK would increasingly turn to their mobiles to access local travel information and journey planning applications. More than ever, consumers expect to source information quickly, spontaneously and with minimal effort – which begs the question, why would you ever need to use a paper map when you have your phone to hand?

Over the last 2 years, GfK have run online qualitative discussions with smartphone owners, asking them exactly that. Over the course of a 3 day online discussion in 2009, which was repeated in 2010, we discovered that the various map formats that exist (both physical and digital) are still widely used, with each format offering unique functional and emotional benefits. There is clearly not one maps service that ticks all boxes for consumers as yet.