Now unless you have been living under a rock, or you are a rock, in which you are fully excuse from knowing about this game changer.  Google is now providing turn by turn navigation on enabled mobile devices for free.  That means any smart phone that has GPS and Interwebs connection will most likely be able to use this… except one.  Can you guess?  Yes iPhone!  OF COURSE Apple and AT&T does not want this. Why should they?  Apple makes a pretty penny for those REALLY expensive Nav apps out there and AT&T is trying to sell a monthly service for their app.  I saw this video last night (at the end of this post) and its a game changer not only because its free, but because it uses what Google is very good at.  Search.  You can say, navigate me to the giants game and it takes you to AT&T (is it still called that?) park.  Nice!  You also get REAL images instead of just cartoon road navigation. THAT is the game changer my friend. Now, I still have concerns..  What happens when I lose connection?  For a long time?  As I’m told, the full route is cached, but I would imagine I would lose rerouting, traffic and images but I can live with that. However, when you start your trip and you do not have interwebs, then you are in trouble.

{update} Matt Burns over at CrunchGear makes a good point that its not like THIS is going to kill off the GPS companies.  There are plenty of people who do not own smart phones and thus stand along GPS is the only option. But He also points out that the current model is a dying model.  Read more here…

Now, will we see this on the iphone?  Eh.. Not at first for the reason I listed above, but I think Apple understands they can only fight the river for so long, so perhaps late next year?  But this I can say, it sucks to be a GPS device company right now. Take a look at  today’s  GRMN’s stock.

Now check out this video from Google.  You will see now why the “rules have changed” (song title)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGXK4jKN_jY&feature=youtube_gdata