I'm not sure I understand what you mean by integration; are you proposing that the mapping app contain the complete map data, which is then occasionally updated as needed? There's a clear advantage to not storing several GB of data you rarely if ever need on a device with very limited storage space.

Flash is a commodity, a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe including the most crazy little roads and cost a relatively small fraction of a cell phone, includes a good chunk of the hardware and comes with an SD slot for upgrades.

Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this was a desirable thing.

All of the US is 1GB. See here: (dutch):

http://www.laptopshop.nl/vragen/29528/115735/tomtom-navigato...

Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).

>a typical navigation device will store all the maps for all of Europe

Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.

If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.

If they paid $3 for that 7GB they'd be fine with it. It's not like you have to store that stuff in RAM.

And this is all especially true if we start seeing memristor arrays replacing flash chips in mobile devices; at that point, the few GB it would take to store a worldwide transportation map would be pocket change.