by MJK on January 23, 2010
Ovi Maps have lately been on the headlines all over the tech media. The news of free offering has brought revolution in the navigation industry and TomTom and Garmin are thinking to pack up or find some other way around the Nokia free Ovi Maps solution. With the new Ovi Maps app, the company is hitting back, especially at Google. More importantly, it’s Nokia’s big chance to become the GPS device maker of choice in countries where standalone navigation devices are still hard to find.
“Maps and navigation are as core and natural in a phone as digital cameras,” Tero Ojanperä, Nokia’s EVP of services, said to me about Nokia’s new release. “We think that the mobile phone-based navigation market is about to take off in a big way. GPS is now commonplace and average consumers are perfectly comfortable with navigation systems, but more importantly complete solutions are finally coming to market.”
According to Ovi Maps offers both car navigation and pedestrian navigation. The free navigation service is initially available on 10 different models with detailed maps in over 180 countries. Included are services as traffic data and travel guides from Lonely Planet and Michelin. Integrated into the system there is also a location sharing feature that works directly with Facebook – a quick share tells your Facebook friends exactly where you are.
More features here
Click here to Download Ovi Maps
Click here to Download Ovi Maps (.mobi extension)
Nokia Ovi Store (Ovi means Door in Finnish) is all set to bring revolution in the app store world with its starting catalog of 20,000 items. I said “Items” and not apps which means the list will include short videos, webisodes besides other media and entertainment items beside the much sought after apps. But still 20,000 is a big number when compared to a few dozen apps with which Google started its own Android storem while RIM and Apple started their stores with few hundred apps. Even at this moment, Apple Apps Store feature around 40,000 apps.
The competition is not only about the numbers as Nokia is planning to bring a lot of interesting features and services in its Ovi Apps Store, which is surely going to re-shape the mobile application market. According to Forbes, the Nokia Ovi store can be accessed in two different ways i.e it will come pre loaded on all the new Nokia phones including the upcoming N97 as well as it can be download to their devices through the web. The idea behind pairing the store with the Nokia mobiles is to give a more comprehensive service to Nokia customers and hence also increase the sale of Nokia devices.
The other main feature of Nokia Ovi store is the representation of wide range of languages and cultures, which will increase its popularity in many different countries of the world. It will also make it a truly global store as per the traditions of Nokia, which has the highest market share in global device market.
Ok hold on your breadth as this is not the end of it! There is one other feature in the new Nokia Ovi Store. It has “Recommendations Engine”, which will recommend different items to the user based on user preferences and the preferences of its friends and family. The purpose is to add a feature based on social networking sites. The recommendations engine will also used GPS facility in Nokia devices to recommend the apps and other items based on the location of the users. Don’t worry if you think its the violation of your privacy as this facility will be enabled by customers themselves.
