By Benedikt von Imhoff Mar 18, 2007, 9:07 GMT
Hanover, Germany - A new satellite-navigation (satnav) device unveiled this week at Cebit, the computing expo in Hanover, Germany, underlines how far the tiny devices have come in the past decade: it whispers commentary like a live tourist guide.
Tomorrow's tourists are likely to wander round the sights of Athens, Hong Kong or New York with a satnav to their ear instead of a guidebook in their hand.
The first vendor, Merian, a German travel publisher, says its Germany guide contains 800 studio-recorded 'drive-by' and 'walk-by' audio-guides to tourist attractions as well as text on 30,000 points of interest including hotels, restaurants, shops and leisure sites.
Merian said the price at launch this summer would be a hefty 600 to 900 euros (780 to 1,170 dollars), which will make most tourists hesitate. For the same money, one could buy dozens of guidebooks.
The new product illustrates a trend: satnav is expanding beyond cars, which often contain the technology as a standard accessory for the dense road networks of western Europe and Japan, and is already a becoming common on high-end mobile phones and BlackBerry devices.
Today's satnav devices use signals from the US network of global positioning satellites (GPS). European Union plans to launch a rival worldwide system, code-named Galileo, by 2011 are being hampered by disputes among the industrial partners.
Brussels believes the devices are no longer a luxury but a vital means of speeding up travel on choked roads, since the route instructions given by a satnav's synthetic voice can steer traffic away from jams, making more rational use of highways.
Hans-Peter Krueger of the Wuerzburg Traffic Studies Centre in Germany says future telematics devices are likely to assist road safety at junctions as well, with satnavs able to pick up data from the road itself 'expanding the driver's field of view.'
Billions of euros may have to be invested to get this information into cars, and no one is volunteering to pay.
'Drivers are definitely going to be charged more for all of this,' said Krueger, adding that the new technology was likely to become compulsory. 'Without it, we'll never be able to keep the increased volume of traffic in the future moving,' he said.
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