The RIM rep was telling me about the GPS in the Playbook.
It does not require a data connection as it is true gps, not a-gps.
This was quite a welcome surprise as I'm planning a roadtrip down to Arizona (Driving from British Columbia) and the current gps we got is Canada only.
If there is a Map already installed on the playbook it would work. My car GPS uses a CD for maps. So data is not needed. Think of it as Garmin built into the Playbook.
Who knows, maybe we will get lucky and maps will be part of the launch update. I recall hearing that there will be a couple of surprises at launch. This would be a pleasant one.
for the time being we will def. need data to get the maps but hopefully in the future there will be downloadable maps like tomtom or garmin did with windows mobile phones.
GPS will give you latitude/longitude but it will not show you what that means... are you on a road? Are you in the middle of a lake? It also cannot do routing without maps.
Unless it either comes with maps or can cache a reasonable radius of maps, it will need data. I can tell you that Arizona is one of those places that my Verizon 9650 could not get data in quite a few locations. So in those locations, you would be lost, quite literally, unless maps/routes were cached. My TomTom with onboard maps were definitely more serviceable.
The "sales pitch" to downloading on the go is that the maps will be more current than a set of older hard-loaded maps. But frankly, unless you live in a rapidly growing area maps don't change all that frequently and then maps are never updated all that fast anyway.
Someone will have to do a GPS Navigator app. Would be kick *** if TomTom or Garmin did one. Or even better if someone would port <a href="http://www.navit-project.org/">NavIt</a> which is free.
Let's not forget about the fact that QNX does in-car navigation systems. The possibilities in this area are amazing if they do a little cross-platform support. The first area like this is Blackberry Bridge (QNX supports something like this in cars). There's no reason why you couldn't buy a CD with full maps (as cars have updates) and update your Playbook with no Internet data.
