Garmin may have an iPhone app store offering

I want germin map

Looking at the top 10 grossing apps for iPhone in the French and Thai app store it is clear Garmin could make quite a good amount of money by proposing their app.
Having them better or not than their standalone GPS is not the point, that's money ruling after all! And having tomtom, navigon and sygic their but not garmin certainly harmed them. Yes a phone is not a full GPS device but it's quite good enough to make a use of it and people take it as it having even sometimes 2 or 3 different GPS app on their phone!
And when you get a GPS on your phone you are definitely less interested at buying a full GPS device as you could simply get the app on your phone and it would do the same (almost).
Happy to see that Garmin is finally considering joining there. This is quite a surprise to see how much GPS enabled mobile are now taking over dedicated GPS hardware. For a long time they were not good enough (due to poor graphical interface, screen and usability I guess) but now this is over. Time to move on and turn to a new type of customers.

Too little, too late. I've owned Garmin GPS units for 10 years - currently two of 'em, a GPSMAP 60Cx and an eTrex Legend Cx - and have spent an ungodly amount of money of maps over the years.

I will never buy Garmin maps again. If both hand-held units die, I will be replacing them, but loading free maps (not pirated - free as in open source: http://ump.waw.pl/en/index.html ...) The hand-held units are appropriate for hiking, kayaking, etc where the iPhone isn't.

My issue isn't even with the pricing - although Garmin's official maps are very expensive - it's their utterly crap software for Mac OS X. It isn't much better on Windows ever since they moved to a new map format, around 6.14.1, but it is really poor even on my 2.4 GHz MBP with 4GB of RAM. I would use "sluggish" to describe the map-rendering performance but that would be insulting to slugs.

iPhone map products still have a ways to go - there needs to be a desktop component to help manage large numbers of points and to make planning road trips and other longer journeys easy. I believe Navigon, TomTom and others will eventually do this and have recently purchased Navigon's $120 Europe map package in order to test it. Next year I will likely purchase a GPS sled if I am happy with the maps and thus have a decent in-car GPS setup.

I just got a Garmin Edge 500 bike computer, with speed, cadence and heart monitor sensors. There are a number of Mac OS X apps that can interface with it. I'm using TrailRunner 3 (free!) on my Mac.

It downloads GPS and sensor info and overlays your route onto a map with total time, speed, cadence, heart rate, calories, altitude, etc. and gives you an interactive timeline. It's very nice!

That said, it would make sense for Garmin to support iOS devices with their standard automobile-centric GPS software.

Forgive my ignorance, but do these apps rely on a 3G connection or can they handle things through GPS? I'm interested in getting one of these apps, but if they rely on 3G then long distance road trips would become very expensive from data charges.

Garmin blew it. They were arrogant and thought they could retain their market share as dedicated GPS devices for cars become dinosaurs, by making their own phone, something they've never done. It was an epic failure. They can't give them away.

I went from using a Garmin Nuvi to Navigon on the iPhone. Disregarding the hardware both systems run on, the Navigon is far better and more accurate than my Nuvi ever was, at a faction of the cost. Garmin has a battle ahead.

This would be nice. When I first got my iPhone, I was sorely disappointed that there was no Garmin app. I eventually settled on the Navigon, because they had lifetime traffic, whereas TomTom did not.

I am very used to Garmins though, as all of my GPS's are Garmin, and I'm very used to their interface. I don't think I'll be an initial owner of the app, however, and will wait for the third update or so, or if they have a massive sale.