Garmin International, Inc. is well known for their satellite navigation products, but their social apps? Integration with Wikipedia, Facebook and foursquare? Indeed, as “mobile lifestyles” will be their focus at Macworld | iWorld 2012 in San Francisco this Thursday through Saturday. Garmin will be showcasing a wide range of location-based apps for iOS spanning aviation, fitness, tracking treasure hunting and, of course, turn-by-turn navigation.

GPS apps have been around long enough for the iPhone that they’ve become pretty commonplace. They’re no longer sold (or bought) simply because they are the only ones available, so new features are what keeps the sales coming. Navigon’s newest feature is another first for navigation apps on the App Store: live traffic data.

The best GPS app on iPhone just got a little bit better. Navigon’s MobileNavigator is already an amazing GPS routing app with its voice prompted directions, smoothly animated maps and excellent everything-I-can-think-of, but Today they’ve added Traffic Live for North America.

Today, Google released their free GPS guidance app for Android 2.0, called Navigation. But rumor, or CNET, has it that the app will make its way to iPhone at some point in the future. Many first time users guess, erroneously, that the iPhone has a GPS navigation app built in. This could fix that, especially if the way it makes it to the iPhone is to replace the Maps app.

According to Yann Lafargue, PR for TomTom, the much anticipated TomTom iPhone cradle will do more than just keep your iPhone’s battery topped off. Its GPS enhancing abilities seem to take advantage of the dock connector on not just the iPhone, but also the iPod touch to enhance (or to add support for) GPS.

If you’re looking for turn by turn, voice prompted, GPS directions on your iPhone, you won’t find it here. You will find real time tracking, continuously updated directions, points of interest, route optimization, location based route recalculation, Navteq maps etc. Simply put, G Maps is as close as it’s going to get until Apple loosens the App Store restrictions.

Since the day I first got my iPhone, the maps feature has taunted me. It can find businesses, identify locations unknown to me, visualize traffic and give decent directions. More recently, even my original iPhone can figure out where I am within a reasonable distance without any GPS. But there’s one thing Maps doesn’t do, and with the GPS built into the iPhone 3G, it’s a big deal. It doesn’t do turn-by-turn voice prompted directions.

When GPS was announced as a feature, the picture instantly in everyone’s mind was that of the iPhone 3G in the car directing you around town, speaking every direction along the way. Needless to say, I was a little let down when I found out this was not what GPS was for. GPS only allows you to find your location accurately, and use that information in creative ways. But the omission of true GPS navigation may soon be filled.

Let’s face it, when it comes to the iPhone and its SDK, there are some types of applications Apple isn’t going to allow. Many of these will be expected, and I certainly don’t care if Apple blocks access to all the applications containing porn and other naughty things. However, some of the applications I assume Apple will block could be extremely great ones that could really help make the iPhone better. The restriction of some of these apps by Apple will probably be pretty disappointing, but we have to remember that they are a company who likes to keep everything pretty much under their control to make sure it is stable.

After the jump are some of the apps that I would love to see on the iPhone, but the chances that Apple will allow them are slim

Remember Thursday when sources close to the TomTom navigation company said they had no prototypes of an iPhone navigation application, nor did they even have plans to make one? Well, it seems as if TomTom has changed their mind. A French representative named Yann Lafargue has come forward and said that TomTom does, in fact, more »

TomTom, a popular GPS navigation company for cars, is reportedly not making any navigation applications for the upcoming iPhone 3G. If you’ll remember, there were rumors floating around a while back that TomTom was, in fact, going to develop for the iPhone, but the company says these are all false. A TomTom internal e-mail memo more »