Monday, June 19, 2006

At last: Sat nav for Nigeria!

Mapit, the South African company that set up shop in Nigeria last year (producing the first decent road atlas) has just launched a sat nav service. Be warned - the website is pretty third rate. Worse still, the images in the adverts (there's a pull out feature in today's Business Day) do not have any sample Nigerian images. Very lazy advertising. They say they have Lagos completely mapped at street level and all other main roads for the rest of the country. The cheapest available device is N83,000.

8 comments:

Akin 2:46 pm  

This might only gain practical significance if it warns about car-jacking wherever you are and gives information about how to get out of there PDQ.

Bea,  10:13 pm  

Sorry to sound negative but Jeremy, you need to do your research first before making sweeping statements. In the 80s, I can clearly remember the then-capital, Lagos, having an A-Z which was well thought out and easy to use.

Akin 1:28 am  

Hello Bea,
In fact, that A-Z covered only so much of Lagos which was the centre - the moment you moved out of the Islands, Surulere, Itire, Mushin, Apapa, Ikeja and Festac the roads lead into white spaces.

Then, an A-Z is completely different from a satellite navigation system - you can have so much mapped out on paper but with technology you really need to have it to scale amongst other things.

I did not note a sweeping statement about paper maps and neither was it a sweeping statement about satellite navigation.

Anonymous,  9:54 pm  

check out www.ceaser-web.com

better mapping - address search, post code search, find my nearest, driving direction nationwide and points of interest search. SATNAV IPAQ base for Nigeria will be launched by us - Third Dimension Technologies - soon.

Anonymous,  6:41 am  

MapNTL.com is Nigeria’s most popular online interactive mapping website, offering a range of free, useful services to assist with everyday life. Key features include street-level maps of Lagos, driving direction to businesses, places, landmarks, cities, Nigeria's Highway mapping data. This means that you can search for any bank, restaurant, hotel, ATM, hospital, school, market, shopping malls, etc in Lagos and get driving direction from anywhere in Lagos.

We also provide driving direction from one city to the other across Nigeria e.g generate a driving route from Ibadan to Maiduguri.

Anonymous,  2:21 pm  

The satellite Navigation market in Nigeria is experiencing a sudden commercial boom, both from the real experts and scammers selling fake GPS navigation devices.

I bought a Garmin 200 RoutePilot Nigeria satellite navigation recently from Navigation Integrated Services Ltd in Opebi, Ikeja (http://routepilotnigeria.com) This is one of the greatest mistakes i had ever made in my life!! The map was so inaccurate and full of inconsistencies!! Over 40% of the streets were not labelled!! I tried using it once to navigate from VI to Unilag. The GPS wanted to route me going against traffic at Adekunle!! Thank God that i know this particular route very well, otherwise LASTMA officials would have impounded my car all thanks to my newly acquired SatNav GPS. The symbols for the POIs were too small to be seen on the map and ultimately useful to the user, the choice of color for the map was a disaster!!

These guys are just in a hurry to make quick naira at the expense of their customers. They do not care what they are peddling!! I have requested for a refund but they ignored me!!

So please when you are buying your SatNav in Nigeria, run away from RoutePilot Nigeria and from Navigation Integrated Services Ltd guys!!

Anonymous,  2:59 pm  

has anyone tried navmii ???

Anonymous,  3:08 pm  

navmii.com is the way forward this system built for mobile phones onboard turn by turn solution with tracking capabilities thrown in .....

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