The news exploded like a bomb at CeBIT: the break between Nav N Go and Mio has been announced by iGO's manufacturer.
Yesterday we visited Mio's stand, but since the news has not yet been announced when we were there, we have received the standard answer, that everything will be all right with map updates of MioMap owners.
Today we have visited again Mio's orange stand (which is the neighbor of Nav N Go by the way) to get an answer to yesterday's question.
The guys at Mio were visibly confused by our question and they have first tried to contact the Product Manager, but since neither did he could answer it, Paul Notteboom, Mio's European president, personally arrived to inform us about the company's strategy regarding the millions of customers left in confusion after the announcement.
Mr. Notteboom has probably been in a fairly difficult situation, as he started his answer with something completely different: he reflected to the Navigon-iGO change, that happened years ago, and informed us that all customers updating their software or maps in the future will receive the new software supplied by Navman and the maps provided by their partner, TeleAtlas.
This raises other questions, to which Mr. Notteboom tried to answer again with the already happened navigation device change: they are of course prepared that this won't be an easy task and thus customers will have the possibility of, besides online updating, receiving updates on an SD card, and thus the need of downloading huge amounts of data (given by the size of the full application) decreases and on the other hand at the occasion of the Navigon-iGO change the number of customer complaints regarding the changed applications has been minimal. According to his promise Navman will only lack some insignificant and small details compared to iGO, but in turn it will have more features in other parts and will be easier to handle, although the president did not mention examples of such parts.
According to Mio, update of the navigation software won't cost them a thing, as Navman is practically their own property, and for the maps they have to pay, this way or another, so that means no extra cost.
The new system will bring about some changes on the maps' regions, but not much has been said about this.
No matter the optimistic words, it is clear that there is a serious amount of chaos at Mio. This is proven by the fact that only the president of the company could answer a relatively simple question and that it is clear from the answers: those who lose the most in this game, are the users.
Translated by Szaszati
