04 December 2008

Nokia World 2008
The Present And The Future Of Nokia Maps

As you might have already know, at the Nokia World in Barcelona Nokia has released the latest version of its mapping and navigation service as well as its personalized online mapping experience on Ovi by Nokia and the folks over at beta labs has published the very nice intro video about the latest version of Nokia's mapping solution.

The first thing you will notice is the new look and feel of our basic map. Colors of the map are now better and performance improvements are easy to detect when panning & zooming the map.

Try out zooming higher up and you’ll see that there is much more road and city information available. In close zooming levels we have the new cool 3D landmarks visible in major cities.

Pedestrian navigation (aka Walk) is guiding you now also in the areas where real routing is not possible. Application offers you simple straight line between your destination & your current position and keeps updating the direction when you move.

In the city areas routing is smart enough to direct you through parks & squares and it’s not tied to streets & paths only. We also have now some audio & vibration alerts during the pedestrian guidance to help you to detect when there is something happening on the screen where you should pay attention.

In car navigation (aka Drive) we have added a route overview to the navigation carousel. You can check the whole route in a one look and see what is ahead of you. When driving, you can be sure that you are not speeding with the help of the speed limit warner and the lane assistance shows you suitable lanes which to take to keep in your route.

Anyway, h ere is the Video Intro... . . .

Here is also very nice and interesting video demo about the Nokia Maps 3.0, Nokia Maps on Ovi and befits of the using the Nokia Maps as the powerful in car navigation system.

This combination of Nokia Maps plus Ovi is the first free service that allows people to pre-plan their journey at home on their PC and synchronize with their mobile, giving access to pre-planned routes and favorite destinations while on the move.

In addition, Nokia Maps has been updated to include a number of new features such as high-resolution aerial images, 3D landmarks for 216 cities and terrain maps, as well as a new route overview during routing and during Drive, the purchasable turn-by-turn car navigation guidance.

So that’s how it looks like at the present but have you ever thought how it might looks like in the future!? Well folks from Nokia's Conversations team have produced another great video which is should demonstrate the "The future of Nokia Maps”!

In future Nokia Maps will provides an interface for updating, managing and storing information about the locations and automatically add the data to geo-aware web, mobile or desktop applications.

Demo video shows real time presence of your contacts, on both the phone and on Maps on Ovi and it can help users to find the physical location of their friends or of services or local information on the easy and intuitive way.