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.

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The ‘Connected Life’ study, which asked 2,000 UK internet users about their favourite services, found 60% of music users stream music directly from the internet. While iTunes still leads the direct-streaming arena (17%), Spotify is coming up at a close second, with 12%.  Looking at all digital music users (not just direct streamers), 11% of these have used Spotify, making this fourth most popular digital music service, behind the more established Real Player (13%), Amazon (24%) and ITunes (50%). Another newcomer, Last.FM, also fares well with seven per cent having used the service; ahead of two of the pioneers of digital music mp3.com (5%) and Napster (4%).

Babita Earle, Divisional Director at GfK Technology comments: