Nokia To Make GPS Navigation Free On Smartphones

mliu writes "In what is sure to be a blow to the already beleaguered stand-alone GPS market, Nokia, the global leader in smartphone market share, has released a fully offline-enabled free GPS navigation and mapping application for its Symbian smartphones. Furthermore, the application also includes Lonely Planet and Michelin guides. Unfortunately, the N900, which is beloved by geeks for its Maemo Linux-based operating system, has not seen any of the navigation love so far. With Google's release of Google Navigation for Android smartphones, and now Nokia doing one better and releasing an offline-enabled navigation application, hopefully this is the start of a trend where this becomes an expected component of any smartphone."

Comments

Navigation on Nokia phones works very well

[Tillmann]

My experience has so far been rather positive. Even an old N82 is an adequate replacement for a dedicated GPS, IMHO.

Re:Outdated

[AuMatar]

You overestimate their loss of marketshare. The smartphone market is a tiny part of the overall phone market, and its only there that they've lost anything at all. They're still the 800 lbs gorilla.

Re:Outdated

[INeededALogin]

The problem is, will Nokia keep on updating their free directions?

You do realize that Nokia owns Navteq which re-sells the map data to other companies. Free doesn't mean that it can't be monetized and profitable.

Re:Offline GPS?

[TheRaven64]

You can download the OpenStreetMap maps for offline use. There's a rather neat Java app that creates a J2ME app with a selectable subset of the data for you. How much space you need depends on how large an area you want. I put everywhere within about an hour's drive of my house on my old phone. With a bigger flash card it's pretty easy to fit the whole UK on (around 150MB, as I recall).

My e71 already does this

[mpapet]

Seriously, you don't know what you guys are missing with Nokia/Symbian phones.

-Media players play DRM free files.
-Easy 802.11 access/use
-Decent 'office' application. Opens my text files, that's all I care about.
-SMTP support. I know they HAD crackberry support on my old communicator. I assume it's still available.
-Apps for a sysadmin.
-Solid mobile java support
-GPS, directions, and all that. However, you need windows as an intermediary between the phone and nokia's maps.
-Symbian is years ahead of Apple or Google's OS. Multiple apps open at the same time, global cut + paste.

I assume later model phones will do all of this too. It's just that Nokia appears to have a very hard time in the U.S.

Re:What about live traffic updates

[mgblst]

Exactly, the best camera is the one you have on you at the time.