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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."
Sure, but their revenue has dropped. In the past year they have lost billions of Euros, have only recently came out with a good competitor phone to Android, the iPhone and the Pre and really, "dumb" phones are on the way out. Think about it, 5 years ago, unless you were a corporate user, you didn't get a smartphone. Today, almost everyone wants a smartphone, and prices for the phones are sharply declining. Eventually, non-smartphones will fade away. Saying that their smartphone marketshare is going down and the rest doesn't matter is akin to saying that computer sales have declined, but hey, we're still selling typewriters.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They will start charging for it when, and if they think they can get away with it. If there is no decent free alternative and they have a good market share they will most likely start to charge for it.
This is why its important to keep projects like http://www.openstreetmap.org/ going, even if just to keep them on their toes
Not so much for navigation as for keeping track of movement. For example if I am in a current I may not know about it visually for a while, but the GPS will tell me straight away what is going on.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
iPhones are not good at navigation yet, I own one, and have lots of problems. I've seen HTC tilt running TomTom software and is good, but hangs sometimes. My girlfriend bought an E75, and despite of some normal issues like thinking I'm on a parallel road, the effectiveness of their system has been, to me one the best among those I tried.
I differ about a previous comment of not buying another stand alone in my life, as I appreciate photography and cellphones cameras are far from a stand alone one. Nokia has been doing a good work also there (Pictures of my iPhone suck real bad compared to my girlfriend's E75).