The market for portable navigation devices (PNDs, or portable GPSs) will shrink 1% this year after 40% growth last year, then remain more or less flat through 2013. So says market researcher iSuppli Corp, which predicts worldwide sales will remain in the range of 41 million to 44 million over the next four years. All that is music to the ears of PND buyers going back for second, third, or fourth devices. With demand soft and manufacturing costs getting cheaper by the year, prices should continue to drop, meaning more $99 PNDs and lots more really good $250 PNDs. That's our prediction, not necessarily iSuppli's, though it doesn't take a rocket scientist to assume better deals for consumers in times of oversupply, if you stayed awake in Economics 101 and understood the part about supply-demand curves.

Blame it all on or credit it to Dutch PND maker TomTom, says iSuppli. "TomTom back in 2004 transformed automotive navigation from a high-margin feature for luxury cars into the mass-market, commodity product we see today," says Richard Robinson, iSuppli's principal analyst for automotive electronics. We think he's pointing the finger not only at in-dash navigation that sells for $2,000, but also at Garmin, the industry's gold standard supplier, but typically selling near the top of the pricing spectrum.

Smart PND makers will shift a chunk of their business from standalone PNDs to cellphones and smartphones, where hardware manufacturing is somebody else's problem. iSuppli believes TomTom could win as much as 25% of what it calls the "high-margin" smartphone business. These products load the application and mapping data onto the phone, typically sucking up a gigabyte (minimum) of storage. They'll be competing with companies such as Networks in Motion that keep just the application on the phone (less than 5MB) and constantly updated maps on the server; NIM is the software behind Verizon's VZ Navigator and the AT&T iPhone Gokivo. They cost $10 a month (or $3 a day); as PND prices come down, their monthly prices may, too.