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.

The term PND has come into widespread use with the growing 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 Garmin Ltd., Mio Technology Corp. or TomTom International BV. are running an off-the-shelf embedded operating system such as Windows CE or Embedded Linux on commodity hardware with OEM versions of popular PDA Navigation software packages such as TomTom Navigator, I-GO 2006, or Destinator. Because many of these devices use an embedded OS, many technically inclined users find it easy to modify PND to run third party software and use them for things other than navigation, such as a low-cost audio-video player or PDA replacement. See OpenTom Project [1] and the Windows CE GPS hacking pages on GPSPassion [2] for more information on PND hacking.