Personal navigation device

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Personal Navigation Device (PND) is a portable electronic product which combines a positioning capability (such as GPS) and navigation functions.

The earliest PND were hand-held GPS units (circa mid 1980's) which were capable of displaying the user's location on an electronic map. These units included simple navigation functions such as course-to-steer and course-made-good. This first generation of PND were primarily used in the leisure, marine and hiking markets.

Widespread usage of the term PND has arisen with the growth in popularity of navigation devices for automobiles. The latest generation of PND have sophisticated navigation functions and feature a variety of user interfaces including maps, turn-by-turn guidance and voice instructions. To reduce total cost of ownership and time to market, most modern PND devices such as those made by Mio Technology Corp. or TomTom International BV. are running an off the shelf Embedded Operating systems such as Windows CE or Embedded Linux on comodity hardware with OEM versions of popular PDA Navigation software packages such as TomTom Navigator, I-GO 2006, or Destinator. Because many of these devices are using an Embedded OS, many technically inclined users find it very easy to modify these devices to run their 3rd party software and use them for things other than navigation as as a low cost Video/Audio player or PDA replacement. See OpenTom Project [1]and the Windows CE GPS hacking pages on GPSPassion [2] for more information on PNA hacking.