20 March 2010

Ovi Maps For Mobile V3.04
A Few Words About Positioning

As you may have already know, Nokia has rolled out a minor update for Ovi Maps Beta for mobile with lot of tweaks here and there to improve the stability and fix a number of installation problems.

Ovi Maps Beta v3.04 improves positioning speed and accuracy, brings faster Map with faster speed and Improved search for cities with zoom out to city level.

Furthermore it also brings a slightly different user interface as the standard “GPS indicator bar” from the bottom right corner of the screen is replaced and here is the explanation from the Ovi Maps dev teamon how it works now.

The GPS position is indicated with a red dot and the map zooms in to a certain zoom level to provide a good overview. There is no visual difference between GPS positioning (picture below) and the WiFi positioning at the moment but we are looking to improve this in future releases.

For cell-ID positioning we show a halo (the red circle around the dot – as shown below). When you have a position fix and you don’t interact with the map, we pan the map to your position fix and zoom in or out to display the whole halo.

If you zoom in, the halo will get more transparent until it's not visible anymore to avoid a full screen overlay of the map. When you zoom out, the halo gets less transparent to show you that the position is not accurate.

When there is no position fix or the position gets lost, there is a grey dot on the last known position (if there is one) and the “back-to-my-position” (top left hand corner) button is blinking. Also, you can see on the top information bar that it will display "Searching for position" - as shown in the example below.

I hope this has provided a better understanding to the new positioning and we’ll be back soon to discuss some of our new ideas with you to make this even better.