Weather-dependent mobile navigation feature saves countless designer shoes from ruin

If you look at the navigation systems in Japan, whether in cars or on mobile phones, it’s immediately obvious the rest of the world still has a long way to go to get to the level of sophistication prevalent in this product category here. It was brought to my attention today that Navitime, one of the leading navigation service providers in Japan, since May ‘07 has been offering a few extremely thoughtful and useful route customization options. The one that I am most impressed with - since it’s been pretty much raining day and night for the past week or so - is have it calculate a route with “as many roofs along the way as possible” (i.e. along overpasses and through buildings rather than around them). What’s cooler still is that the application synchronizes with real-time weather information, so when it’s pouring it’ll actually serve up the driest possible route automatically. Just what Tokyo girls need when they take these or these for a walk this time of the year - especially because Navitime offers a “show route with as few stairs as possible” option as well. Excellent stuff! There’s an overview of this here (in Japanese, but you get the picture).

Posted by:Billich | Entry Date: 2008年6月 5日 18:22