The first Android phone shipped last month with Google’s mapping software built in, showing your position by satellite, giving spoken turn-by-turn directions, and costing nothing beyond the phone itself and whatever data plan you already had. That is, functionally, the exact product a dedicated navigation device sells for a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars, arriving as a free feature on a phone people were buying anyway.
I do not think the companies selling standalone GPS units have fully absorbed what that means yet.
Their entire business, TomTom and Garmin chief among them, is built on a specific pattern. Sell the hardware at a real margin, then sell map updates afterward, a recurring purchase most owners eventually skip because it costs money and the roads mostly have not moved. That model works when the alternative is a paper map and a sense of dread. It works considerably less well against a competitor that gives away the hardware feature and updates the maps continuously, silently, at no additional charge, because the map data lives on a server rather than a memory chip inside a dashboard unit.
The counterargument the dedicated device makers will make, and it is not a weak one, is that a purpose-built unit still does several things a phone does not do well. Battery life dedicated entirely to navigation rather than shared with everything else the phone is doing. A mount and a screen actually designed to be glanced at while driving. A GPS receiver that doesn’t also need to handle a phone call arriving mid-route.
Those are real advantages today, and I would not want to bet on how long they last. Phone hardware improves every year in exactly the direction that erodes each one of them: battery life, screen quality, dedicated chips for exactly this kind of positioning work, and none of that improvement requires the phone industry to do anything specifically aimed at hurting Garmin. It is simply what phones get better at anyway.
My guess is the standalone device survives as a product for a few more years on the strength of those remaining advantages, shrinking a little each year, and eventually becomes a niche the way the standalone music player is becoming one now that the phone in your pocket does that too.