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.