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RouteBuddy 
TomTom's do not have 3D maps, nor do any other PNDs on the market.
But there are the new 3D landmarks and 3D city maps from TeleAtlas. It is just a question of (short?) time, before someone uses them. If they can show you the major buildings etc, they may be more useful than 3D terrain maps. Especially in Holland for which the third dimension is mostly superfluous :-)
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processing power of the average PND but think we'd all agree it would be very minor compared to that of a real computer. ;-)
True, but I would not underestimate the PNDs. The memory and cpu footprint of an embedded OS, stripped down for just one purpose, is much much lower than that of full OS X. And you can use surprisingly good hardware acceleration on the PND's if you know in advance what exactly you want to accelerate. It is when you start adding more and more functions when you beat this advantage and can fully utilize the power of regular computer.
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Hacking would be a huge and costly task to undertake, anyway the software is Linux.
Costly or cheap, hacking the software would be illegal. Reverse-engineering of data formats is already quite close to the edge...
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To explain: The raw data set for North America is 14GB (from Tele Atlas or Navteq) and for this we developed our own proprietary compression engine which reduces the 14GB to 7GB (installed), this data decompresses and compresses on-the-fly.
An alternative view could be that you are wasting CPU time while the same issue could be just as well addressed by a bigger HDD (which is what TT seems to be doing recently) ;-)
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Currently, amongst other things, we are working on Stage II of this compression engine and plan to make greater reductions in installed map sizes but-without-loss-of-any-fidelity.
You will probably disagree, but is it really wort the effort when you can buy 250GB HDD for the mini?
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Loss of fidelity is a critical issue in any map software because if a developer extracts data to get a smaller installation size then the accuracy (detail) is lost at the same time.
While I agree in principle, it all depends on what you need. If you can extract the important data (for navigation this means mainly the junctions), most users will probably not care about the lost information. Lossy image compression formats such as JPEG have been around for quite a while and most people do not seem to mind (I do and I use RAW myself).
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100% data = 100% fidelity = 100% accuracy
10% data = 10% fidelity = 10% accuracy
Is this a fact or just an example? From what I know TT is also using a pretty smart compression algorithm.
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ergo RouteBuddy with 100% data is best suited to render high definition, high quality and high accuracy maps on your screen.
Such as the aquaduct on A4 between Amsterdam and Den Haag? :-D
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Google are in the advertising business, not the road mapping business.
Have you seen their Professional version of the Google Maps API? I would say they are very much into the location-aware application business, including stuff such as fleet management etc.
BTW: Have you changed something int he compression engine in 1.4? The maps now draw significantly faster on my MBP.