Rate it:

4.33

Thursday's announcement by Nokia to release a new (free) version of Ovi Maps for its smartphones with walk-and-drive navigation has the potential to nearly double the size of the current mobile navigation market.

It's a bold move, and will only intensify competition between handset makers' services, Google/Microsoft offerings, and third-party clients. Spare a thought too for the traditional GPS makers.

Nokia says it has 84 million GPS-enabled devices in the market, but its active user base is far lower than that. By contrast however, Nokia claims that Google Maps Navigation is only available for a handful of devices in one country in one language.

One of the fruits of Nokia’s acquisition of Navteq, the new Nokia Maps has turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries – including South Africa - in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

From March, new Nokia smartphones with GPS will include the new version of Ovi Maps, along with Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost.
But the major difference between Ovi Maps and Google, Nokia says, is the fact that its maps use hybrid-vector maps, which are far more compressed than rival systems. This means Ovi Maps is 10 times more efficient than Google’s product.

Ovi Maps downloads these vectors onto devices, and it does not matter if you’ve lost 3G or data connectivity while travelling on your route, the basic functionality will still work.

By comparison, Google Maps Navigation has to constantly download maps over a network connection
But the low data consumption is something both users and operators are going to love.

20km trip with A-GPS and traffic updates*
Ovi Maps – 200KB
Google Maps – 2MB

5 trips per month for 1 million users*
Ovi Maps – 1000GB
Google Maps – 10000GB

Network delivery cost per month for 1 million users*
Ovi Maps – $110000
Google Maps – $1100000

*Nokia figures, network delivery at $0.11/MB

Navigable countries for Drive and Walk navigation: Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, China / Hong Kong / Macau, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, DOM, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, La Reunion, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USA, Vatican, Venezuela.

Current list of compatible Nokia devices: Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia E52, Nokia E55, Nokia E72, Nokia 5230, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6730 classic and Nokia X6

Add to: del.icio.us | Digg