GARMIN PEOPLE: I don’t think I’m giving you any new news that the Motorola Droid is going to eviscerate your high end Garmin car NAV unit sales. You will lose sales, slowly at first (now) and then rapidly until it falls to essentially zero as each person who might buy a $500 Garmin instead buys a Motorola Droid.

That leaves the low end where you can excel. Make the screen great, update over the web (using people’s Droids for signal), give it for one low cost one time to people like cabbies who might not want to spring for a Motorola Droid and the monthly plan to run it but want top notch NAV. Leverage the Motorola Droid explosion rather than battle it.

But that isn’t the point of this brilliant idea from The Mind Of Baker. This is about the Astro 220: An incredibly good idea but poorly implemented – not that it doesn’t do a great job with the technology it uses. But it requires a $650 up front purchase and then $150 per extra dog and it’s hard to use and not very exact. As it’s running of satellites only, the dog running circles around you confuses the Garmin device and by the time you’ve caught up, the dog can be quite aways away before you give chase – and that’s the point of the person using it for his pet and not a hunting dog.

Here’s where you could make gobs of money with little extra effort: make an app for the Motorola Droid. Make it perfect on that exact device and recommend that the user buy only that one for the best experience. The Motorola Droid in on the best network in the lower 48, the Verizon network, and anyone willing to pay ten bucks a month to track a dog doesn’t want second best.

Then make a new Astro 220 sender unit that still sends to the handset as it does not but it can also hook it to cellular, blue tooth, GPS and WiFi, whatever it can find, to determine the exact location of the dog, the exact location of the phone and point the human toward the dog if the person just uses the phone and pays $9.99 a month for the first dog on one account, $3.99 for each additional dog or whatever is a good balance between you and Verizon because YOU get $199 for the collars up front but also get $1/month from the main account and, say 50 cents for each extra dog on an account per month that the person uses the collar. This gives you an incentive to make the best collar possible as you’re getting paid for each month the person uses it and Verizon the incentive to keep running the tightest ship in the mobile network business.

One thing to do better on the collar is make it something people let the dog wear all the time. Get the antenna inside the collar, line the collar with nice lifetime leather which is better for dog’s necks, get a couple of tag options on there (places to securely attach a tag), have a bonus package where the dogs name and the customer’s Google Voice line is embroidered on the nylon or have an all leather option with a brass name plate. Make it something that can change out on the brass version so you can charge a bundle and call it a lifetime collar – the human’s lifetime with the change out plates. Hopefully people would pay the monthly on it even when there might not be a dog around who needs it at that time.

Also have sport options where you can attach lights or harnesses or saddle bags that integrate with the Robo Collar. Try out an option where for an extra $1.99/month, the person can CALL the collar and have it auto answer. Then the person could try to call the dog back or, through the open mic on the collar that you can turn on or off from the Motorola Droid, try to determine the dog’s location or even talk to someone who might have found the dog – because, of course, there is a very secure (that is,