Nokia, The giant of mobile phones has established a free map and sat nav service for their mobile handset that could challenge stand alone sat nav. The need to download or update new maps over the net is cut down by store map service on the phone. Ovi maps will offer ‘turn by turn’ navigation, similar to that of the present GPS device. The Ovi maps are initially made available in 10 sets of Nokia that can display local information from travel guides like Lonely planet. To surf more information, people are also given an option to post their location to face book.
Ovi Maps is a huge squeeze up with the environment and that Nokia is expecting third party service to develop and build the new application. The corporation figures out that it has already sold phones with the new service providing free download option from the Ovi application store. The Ovi store is Nokia’s internet service accessed from your mobile providing wide options on Games, Maps, Media, Messaging, Music and more. In short the store has got all the stuff you are searching for to be in your mobile.
All the upcoming mobile phones of Nokia comes compatible with the new service. Earlier, Nokia customers will have to pay a particular amount of sum to avail the service and now it comes compatible with the mobile phones, giving more convenience to its user. The Ovi maps is a ‘serious blow’ for companies like Tom Tom that exclusively sells stand alone sat nav devices.
In order to speed up the process of downloading, instead of equipping traditional bitmap images, Nokia has come up with something called ‘vector graphics’ with which images appear 10 times smaller, even then looks very similar. The turn by turn service is made available in over 180 countries among which 74 of those will also include voice navigation service in addition. Depending whether the user is in car or on foot, the service sports different routes and is made available in 10 sets of which the most popular being N97 mini.
Nokia has been motivated by its driving mobiles sales and is now concerned about making future profits through the new service in the way of advertising and selling maps.
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