Slashdot Mirror
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."
My experience has so far been rather positive. Even an old N82 is an adequate replacement for a dedicated GPS, IMHO.
When iPhone came out with free navigation, even if Garmin is a lot better, I concluded that I will never buy a standalone:
- GPS navigator
- compact camera.
- camcorder.
- watch
- document scanner
- portable game console
- mp3 player, video player
- a bunch of other things from last century like voice recorder, calculator, radio etc.
With 8Gb camera, 720p video, GPS navigator, I will be better off upgrading the phone every year than buying all these devices every 3 years. I am sure it will not take more than 2 years for a feature in my phone to beat the standalone device in features/functionality, and best of all, I will have it in my hand when I need it, not in a drawer somewhere.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
You don't get the convenience of having so much in one small package at your fingertips whenever you want it? .. wow
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Apparently not that much, since they already fit in a GPS device. I'm pretty sure my Garmin doesn't have a huge multi-gig flash drive, as old as it is. Not to mention they could just cache- most people don't travel more than 100 miles frequently, they could download the area where you're at on first use, then update it if and only if you move twoards the edges of that zone (basically in ral time for a long car ride, after landing for an airplane).
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
I own an openmoko and my wife owns an HTC Magic, running android. I know five or so people who own iPhones. I am yet to see a device which can replace my Garmin etrex.
I regularly attach the garmin to the deck of my sea kayak and dunk it in the ocean. I don't plan on doing that to a smart phone.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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
GPS apps have been insanely overpriced. There was maybe justification for paying $100 for an actual GPS receiver and dedicated computer plus software, but charing $100 for some map data and a simple app to display it was never going to be a tenable practice. The navigation companies milked their hardware for a few years and got to milk their software for a year or so. Now they're going to have to compete.
That's what's impressive about this Nokia solution. It's the first free solution that allows for downloading the map database to your phone for offline usage.
Sure, but their revenue has dropped. In the past year they have lost billions of Euros
Why, anyone would think there wasn't this great big recession. Is that really a reason to assume that they're going to stop updating, therefore this is worthless? Face it, you're just spreading FUD. One could make the same claim of any navigation system.
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.
But now you're conflating market success, with your own personal opinion. Which are we debating? If the latter, here's mine - my old Motorola V980 from 2005 did things the Iphone took years to catch up on, and now Nokia have the 5800 which works just as well as any Iphone, at half the price. (Android isn't a phone, it's an OS, btw.)
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.
So what's your definition of smartphone?
If you're defining smartphone as "not a dumbphone" then non-smartphones died years ago. Any feature phone can run apps, access the Internet, they run operating systems and it's been this way for at least 5 years. Any phone today (except the absolute bottom of the market) is a smartphone, in the sense of what we once understood by the term. If we define smartphone in terms of features, then either all feature phones are smartphones, or the Iphone doesn't deserve to be a smartphone.
In this market, Nokia are still solid.
But when you see news articles talking about the smartphone market, they don't mean this, they simply mean some ill-defined category that covers the most expensive phones. Therefore, "smartphone" is simply the high end of whatever phones are available at the time, therefore it will never go away (unless all phones become dirt cheap). And it will also never be the case that everyone will have "smartphones" by this definition, because there'll still be people who buy the lower end phones.
Indeed - everyone knows the only useful measure here of market success is "Which company gets more market share on Slashdot front page?"
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.
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).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But are you carrying all of those with you all of the time?
Being able to browse the web WHEREVER or take a picture NOW (maybe even pictures of your car after it was hit by somebody, or their license plate) is useful. I say this as someone who thinks the monthly rates are very expensive btw. (I have one supplied by work now.)
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.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Exactly, the best camera is the one you have on you at the time.