NDrive has just announced its new GPS navigator, the NDive Touch, which starts to be sold this week for a price starting at 139 euros. The new equipment is 40% lighter and thinner than the company’s previous generation, but it also outperforms other models that the competition has in the market.
The engineering of NDrive Touch was developed in Portugal by a national team that worked during the last year on the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and on the product design itself, achieving its reduction and optimization, explained Eduardo Carqueja, Administrator at a press conference from NDrive Systems.
“This is a radical change in the architecture of the device that places us at the top of world excellence at a technological level”, guarantees Eduardo Carqueja.
At 13 mm thick and 110 grams in weight – in the smaller screen version (3.5 inches), NDrive touch incorporates other novelties, such as the brightness sensor that adjusts the screen brightness and the gesture sensor that allows navigating the menus by touching the touch screen.
At the platform level, NDrive Touch launches version 3.3 of the company’s software, which guarantees better image quality and the use of rendered three-dimensional images, through a new graphics engine, in addition to a faster search. This new version will also be available for free to upgrade the current NDrive models, but Eduardo Carqueja has not yet confirmed the date when customers will be able to make this update.
On the maps, the company’s focus continues to be on improving points of interest in Portugal, a development that is also being carried out in relation to Spain. At the moment in the Iberian Peninsula, more than 120 thousand points of interest are already referenced, which led NDrive to create the concept of Premium Maps, which in addition to mapped and georeferenced information have points of interest that no other competitor has.
NDrive will be on sale from Saturday at FNAC stores and will gradually be extended to other retail stores. Prices range from 139 euros for the 3.5-inch screen model and 1 GByte of memory, which contains maps of the Iberian Peninsula in Premium version and 199 euros for the XL version, with a 4.5-inch screen, and 8GBytes of memory, also with premium maps of the Iberian Peninsula.
Expanding businessAlthough he does not want to anticipate yet what sales are expected for this new model, Eduardo Carqueja adds that NDrive sold 70,000 pieces of equipment in Portugal this year and that in 2009 there is no reason to sell less, despite the difficult economic context that makes retailers retract in terms of sales forecasts.
The technological innovations developed by NDrive for the Touch are also opening new business possibilities for the company that is preparing to license the hardware to entities that show interest in selling the NDrive Touch, maintaining the brand but avoiding the logistics necessary for production large quantities, as JoĂŁo Neto, President of NDrive Navigation Systems, who also answered some questions from TeK in an interview that will be published today.
