As smartphones pose a competitive threat to GPS PNDs, vendors have been keeping eyes on product developments in 2011 and will follow suit offering PNDs with larger screens, higher performance processors and Android platform.

Viewing that smartphone screens tend to exceed 4-inch, new PNDs in 2011 will increase from 4.3-inch to about 5-inch to mainly meet demand for multimedia, sources indicated.

Many smartphones are equipped with processors over 1GHz and dual cores. There is no need to adopt dual-core processors for the time being, but higher performance, 800MHz or 1GHz processors is necessary to enable video recording of car movement at 1080p resolutions, the sources said.

While most PNDs are based on Linux or Windows CE, some vendors are developing Android models to minimize R&D costs, and to leverage the availability of Android-based applications and connectivity with tablet PCs, handsets and other hand-held devices, the sources analyzed.