Nokia 500 PND

Well it looks like Nokia announced today the arrival of its next generation of PND, due out in Europe in 4Q and the U.S. by end of year or early 2008. Reviews for the first try (the 330) weren't all that great... cnet review categorized it as 'not horrible, per se'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. On paper the new 500 seems to have a lot of the high end features that one would presumably want when buying a system... like built in bluetooth for using the device as a hands free system and an fm transmitter for easily tapping into the vehicles existing stereo system. The 500 also speaks road names and ties the POI contact information to the communications systems to make it easy to call ahead to a POI with a touch of a button. Although none of this is the first time we've seen these capabilities in a PND, it's all catch up to Garmin as far as I can tell. I thought the feature that allows you to upload the addresses of your contacts from your phone to your PND so you can navigate to them was a nice touch, although one that I doubt will get much use.

Price is set at 300 euro, which seems to undercut similar Garmin offerings by about 1/3, but the devil is likely to be in the details. Folks have been screaming that the sky is falling for pure play gps manufacturers like TomTom and Garmin for quite a while... ie prices will begin to collapse and massive competition is on its way. And this Nokia offering certainly seems to be a case in point. However, for customer that are willing to shell out many hundreds of dollars for a PND, I'd question how sensitive they will be to that extra hundred dollars or two when faced with the alternative between "not horrible" and state of the art.