Nokia's free Smart2Go maps and routing service for S60 and Windows Mobile smartphones has finally gone live, only 3 days late and it would be churlish to complain too much. There will be a review along fairly shortly, I'd expect, once any of the AAS team get a chance to draw breath...

Read on in the full article (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/4906_Smart2Go_finally_available.php).

In the suported phones list only series 60 3rd edition phone are listed, if i download the N73 version will it work on my 6680?

No

will it work with the SE P990i?

Erm .. will Nokia's free utility work on a Sony Ericsson phone not running Nokia's S60 OS? I'm guessing not, eh ;-)

Just got it and installed it on my E61. The application itself works OK OTA, if a little slowly. Getting maps onto it via a USB connection takes forever. I don't know if the problem is with Nokia's servers being hammered, or some glitch with the Map Loader application (e.g. loading approx. 55Mb of maps on a 2Gb microSD card will take about 40 minutes).

Also, it looks like the City Guides and some of the navigation/route planning features are add-ons that need to be purchased.

I downloaded England map (90mb) in 15mins so it must have been the servers

will it work with the SE P990i?
Now, there is only S60v3 phones and Windows Mobile 5 phones. But, I think that list go rise with time. Check on smart2go site.

5 hours to download 49 mb!!

Application doesn't seem to work OK on my N93. It is very slow and maps are distorted. Roads start and stop randomly and for example Nokia HQ seems to be unreachable by car.

Looks like site is down... I guess they couldn't handle the load.

installed couple of times, always missing some parts of maps...seems like real beta

Well, I tried downloading all 4 UK maps last night (about 125MB) and it took well over an hour. Once finished (bar reached 100%) the MapLoader app froze, with the timer shown Time Remaining in a minus figure. The app on the phone then didn't seem to work properly. So I decided to uninstall the maps using the function in MapLoader. This again took an age but ultimately was successful. I then tried to download and re-install the mapsusing both the Mass Storage setting on my N73 and also with the card in my PC card reader, and on both occasions, the download stayed at 0.0% and gave me some ridiculous Time Remaining as 2000+ hours !!

I guess servers were taking a bit of a hit last night so I will give it till the weekend maybe and see how I get on there.

But to be perfectly honest, as others have said, TomTom takes a hell of a lot of beating and as yet, I have seen nothing to topple it from the top spot.

I downloaded the maps ok, took about an hour.

Works fine for me on an N80.

Amusingly enough though I set up a route to my parents house setting the transport option to go 'on foot' it planned the route ok but when I went to view a simulation of the route it went a different way and wanted me to walk down the A3M motorway.

Not a good as tomtom but still a nice app for a freebie, ideal for walking around towns etc - as long as you stay of the motorway that is !!


Oh and like latest TomTom maps the maps are out of date, they still show a major roundabout at the junction of the A27/A3/M275 in Portsmouth, which in reality was removed several years ago and replaced with an american style mega junction.

I signed up for a month's worth of navigation, for the purposes of an AAS full review....

First impressions are good, but that there are data and app problems that need fixing. No sound on my N93, a few mis-handled keystrokes etc.

I wonder if they'll notify anyone when new versions go live?

Incidentally, you don't need data use when using Nokia Maps - I kept it disabled and was able to do full navigation. I had loaded in the whole of the UK using MapLoader.

Or maybe the voices are supposed to come down over a data link? Shudder. Anyone know, or have voices?

Steve

when you choose spoken language it downloads voices

Has anyone got the city guides working? When I select it it just closes the app. However, I can select the other 'Extra' okay, the 'Add navigation'

FWIW I'm using an N73 (latest 3UK firmware)

Yup, voices are now working after a 1MB or so download 8-)

Terrible routing though, I just got sent on a 2 mile detour when there was a straight 1/2 mile road to get to the same destination.

I guess it's all still in beta etc. I've reported some of my issues.

Steve

I gave up waiting for the voice prompts to download on my phone (I have an N73, so cant get it over WiFi using an access point at home like Steve can). Who knows how much of my paid up front data tarrif allowance I've used on this!

It seems a bit short sighted to let you download the maps to a PC but not the voice prompts....

And even without the navigation option, I can get the phone app to plan a route... so what do you get extra with the navigation option?

Andy.

As far as I can tell, the free version gives you text route instructions, followed by tracking progress on a map - the paid version gives you on-screen turn instructions plus voice prompts. I've got Smart2Go now on two devices, one paid up and one without, and I'll do more tests in the coming weekend.

And yes, Wi-Fi does help enormously for this sort of one-off bulky download. And I've no idea why the voices aren't part of the MapLoader....

Steve

Steve

you can plan route and go simulation mode with voice promts. GPS is only needed for map moving... and finally it seems I managed to load all map data with maploader earlier there was alwas missing some parts...

This is a very strange product. They are giving away kind of the middle bit of a satnav system.
Are they trying to lure the unconverted to a subscription service, or are they trying to steal market share from Garmin, Tomtom etc.?
Not that I'm complaining about free maps on my phone that I don't need a data connection to use out-and-about (damn you googlemaps!) ;)

I could not find E50 in the list of supported phones. When NOKIA says it's supported on S60 3rd Edition, shouldn't this include E50 also?????

It should, unless there's some issue/change/difference in E50 that makes it not work. However, if you download for, say N73 and try, it'll probably work.

Ok, I have three times now tried downloading the 4 UK maps (England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland) and on every occasion, the download takes a few hours and when the progress meter reaches 100%, the download progress continues, it doesn't stop and the time remaining goes into minus figures. The only way to stop this is to cancel the download.

Once this has been done, my memory card shows up as full, even though there was about 250MB free and the 4 maps totalled 125MB approx. The phone then becomes almost unusable because it is continuously popping up a "Memory Low" message

The only way to rectify the situation is to use the "Remove Maps" feature of MapLoader.

This renders the whole application pointless.

Is anyone else experiencing issues like this ?

I am running a Nokia N73 ME on firmware V 3.0705.1.0.31.

Hello,

Could you write where are the voices saved (into MMC with map data or phone memory)? What is the format of voices (wav, mp3, amr, ...)?
Are the voices loud enough in the cars with diesel engines?

I was thinking why they haven't made some sis files with 'voice packs'...

Best Regards,
jack

I found that on N93 'Search by address' option always results in 'Nothing found' (no matter as many fields you fill in) - this relates to Polish maps which were installed in the phone without problems. Any clues?

Best Regards,
jack

Like others I took ages to download England and a bit of France -despite a fast broadband connection.

Once on my E70 I was impressed. I don't use SatNav as I find it distracting but having the maps on the phone to allow route checking and address finding offline is absolutely fantastic - and free.

I love it.

I have a newly - OS upgraded Nokia N73, on the '3' network in Sydney, Australia.
Here's my experience with it all.

Original install onto the N73 was easy and worked first time - even with the N73 still running a 2.x version of its OS. Problem was when I went to upgrade (ie: pay) for the version with navigation- it would crash. Thus, a trip over to the nokia care centre in Chatswood solved it.

The maps download quickly and reliably from the data connection - but of course, I'd rather have them on the mmc memory chip. Well, bugger me if nokia decided that they wern't gonna give mac users a go!! I had to drive 50 minutes away to my closest buddy with a PC, to get him to download the Australian maps.

And there was the next problem - Nokia's hoplessly inefficient file server. One could forgive the maploader apps bug (being it's still in beta), but really - to wait 6 hrs for a 25 meg download (approx...) and have the maploader app CRASH at the 92% mark? Not stoked.

Tomorrow i'm off to Japan, and had hoped to carry maps with me. Not gonna happen, at least until I can tee up Me, My phone (which must be in not-taking-calls mode for the duration of the download), and my PC buddy - all when Nokias IT guy get the server working at a reasonable speed.

So has anyone here successfully downloaded the Aust maps?

Kez

I am not convinced it is the file server end that is so slow. I had similar problems with Maploader (trying to download 18.5MB China map):
1st attempt: Estimated at 2 hours but kept increasing estimate - cancelled and moved to better WiFi point
2nd attempt: Estimated 2000 hrs. - Cancelled
3rd attempt: Estimated 2 hours but slowed down and had to cancel.
Found device memory card was full and had to use MapLoader to "Clear all maps on device" even though the maps are not listed, not visible(?) on device, and CHKDSK doesn't list any problems. Doing this clearing took a long time = > 30 mins.
4th attempt: (From home). It took maybe 6 hours to get to "100%" and the time kept counting into negative time... .I let it run another 5.5 hours before aborting it.

Again the memory card is allegedly full... but MapLoader 'hangs' at clearing the card (just shows "Maps are being deleted...") - even after several hours. I don't know if it is clearing the card or doing nothing. I am wondering if the communication between PC and the N80 via MapLoader is extremely slow for some reason. It could be the root problem also explaining the slow downloads?

Does anyone know how I can clear the card to try downloading the maps again?

I have downloaded maps fine for UK and done some simple navigation routes from work to home (and it uses the same route I do anyway which is nice to know).

The problem I am having is routing in Spain - I am going there on holiday soon and wanted to try and use it there but it cannot find routes without going online. I have all the maps of the areas I am going to and travelling through downloaded to the memory card, but asking for a route says route not found, then it tries online and finds the correct route. I cant do this once I am out there as roaming data charges are extortionate. It also doesnt seem to store the routes once I have found them so has to go online every time. Anyone got a solution to this?

(if anyone want to try and reproduce, try and plan a route from say barcelona to valencia or madrid)

lovesign, I had the same issue. It took about 3-4 hours to load the Poland map and then it went into negative time. After cleaning up the memory card I decided to use airtime to see how good the maps were. Unfortunatley, my area of Poland only has a few major roads listed.

I downloaded the mobile version of Map24 (map24.com) for Series 60 and find it very complete, very fast and very easy on the KBs.

I located at least part of the source of the problems with installation of the maps.
The Map Loader creates thousands of small files and the disk space they occupy is far more than predicted due to the file slacks (the difference between the size of the data in the file and the minimum file size of 1 cluster).

I initially overlooked these files because I knew my memory card was full and so was searching for (and not finding) a folder containing a large amount of data - the reason is that many utilities report the disk space used by the file contents without also reporting the space occupied on disk (or when it did list both my eyes locked only on the first figure).

This problem was compounded by the fact that at some time some of these files on my memory card became corrupted (perhaps during one of the deliberate or accidental disconnections while the Map Downloader was still trying to work). I had managed to partially install the China maps so I could see major roads in China in the phone but Map Downloader did not indicate that China maps were installed.
As a result of this file corruption I was not able to delete the maps with the Map Downloader and nor was I able to uninstall smart2go.

The remedy was to find and delete the diskcache folder concerned which on my card was
/private/20001f*/diskcache
(I used a wildcard to partially disguise the folder name above in case it is user specific)

Some more detail
I installed Smart2Go on my 256MB media card.
When I first launched Smart2Go (without a network connection) the /private/20001f* folder is populated with 272 folders, but only 5 files amounting to a total 484 bytes (size on disk 48 KB).

Map Loader inaccurately showed that space on my device was 120.5 MB
[Memory card app says 168 MB free]

China maps are listed as 18.5MB, therefore it seems reasonable to think that there is space to install them in the 168MB of free space [Wrong!]
As soon as I start to download China maps the "Space left on device" listed by Map Downloader changes from the original value of 120.5MB to 101.9MB - which is consistent with the 18.5MB alleged size of the China maps. It does not decrease as installation proceeds.

The download then starts with an initial estimate usually 2 hours, sometimes 1 hour.
It actually takes longer than this and then over-runs at the end, perhaps because the media card is full. Inevitably I am forced to break the connection and kill the Map Loader process.
At this point, examining the /private/20001f*/diskcache folder shows it contains 10,625 files totalling 15.3MB but which occupy 169MB of space due to the file slacks.

This equates to about 15,240 bytes wasted space per file. I guess the clusters are 16k in size and the actual data in each is only about 144 bytes (after all there is very little detail in the China maps). Therefore, extrapolating the 15.3MB installed to the 18.5MB claimed size I predict I would need about 204MB of free space on my media card to install the China maps.

Speculations

Probably the amount of wasted space is less if the map is more detailed but the total space consumed will be no less (I suspect the number of files is related to the geographical area of the map - some kind of tiling scheme).

Probably it would be possible to reduce the space wasted by reducing the cluster size with which the media card is formatted (my card was as provided by Nokia - do they have a good reason for using large cluster sizes? - I understood disk fragmentation was not an issue for memory cards because they don't suffer the slow access times of hard disks).
Perhaps also internal phone memory is more efficient in storing data.

It occurred to me the very slow installation speed might be related to all the file operations that are involved in creating so many files. I temporarily changed the profile for USB disks to "Optimize for performance" instead of "Optimize for quick removal" in the Hardware device manager, but I did not make any detailed timing comparison and it still takes hours even with that setting (and of course it increases the risk of corruption when you deliberately or accidentally break the connnection).

I don't know why deleting maps was so slow. Currently deleting "All maps" to remove the partially installed China maps seems to take a few tens of seconds but earlier it had seemed to take tens of minutes, and when the files were corrupted, it would apparently hang.

Advice for people considering installing maps is

Consider formatting memory cards with small cluster sizes to minimize space wastage.
Figure on much more memory being used than predicted by the Map Downloader (more than 10x more in my case).
Be prepared for a long time to install (or uninstall) - expect it to run overnight. Don't start if you will need to interrupt it in a few hours.
Make sure that the phone battery is well charged or it is on the charger.

As for me - well it's back to Pathaway running on my Sony Clie TH55 - I don't think these maps are yet good enough to consider getting a bigger memory card or going to the trouble of reformatting this one. It would also help if the software was more mature - as in correctly estimating the amount of disk space it will take to install.
Better still, tiling the way Pathaway does - within a single file so there is no issue of space wasted in file slacks.

Hi,

I’ve problems downloading voice guides. The first time I was downloading the voice file the session was interrupted because my battery went low. Now, every time I’m trying to download the file again the phone(n73)crashes. I’ve reinstalled - the problem still persist.


Does someone know where this file is?
I’ll probably have to remove it manually.

Thanks

P.S. Yes I've upgraded for a month. Paid more then 10€ for downloading voice and is not working :(
Hope someone can help here.

I already uninstalled smart2go but the space in my memory card is still almost full. How do I find the disk cache folder where the small files you mentioned are in? Are they hidden files? What is the best way to remedy this problem?

In the case of the files I found - they are in a hidden folder called "private" on my memory card.
I did not see it with either the built in file browser or Yucca Tools.

1. on a PC check that you can see hidden files:
i.e. from a Explorer window make sure the following radio button is checked: "Tools" - "Folder Options..." - "View" (tab) - "Hidden files and folders" - "Show hidden files and folders"

2. Connect to the PC in "mass storage" mode

3. Now you can see all the folders on the media card. Select and right click one to view the "Properties..."

Note both the "Size" and "Size on disk" values. Repeat while you tunnel down the folder tree until you locate the folder which is consuming a lot of space on 'disk'.

The Nokia maps/ smart2go seems does not work perfectly on my N73. I've downloaded the map for california and neveda (USA), but I believe the maps were not quite complete. It cannot locate some addresses e.g. street address inside the university or mall address (whereas yahoo/google has no problem locating). Even if it does find you the addresses on the map, it fails to calculate routing between the two spots and gives me "no route found!" message. I think routing ability of smart2go application is FAR LESS capable than yahoo/ google map. However, it's not fair to say the smart2go application is useless. It does work for some address and route, but not all. Another plus about the nokia maps I downloaded is that it has pre-stored business e.g. restaurant/ hotel that you can look up by using "keyword search". By typing in "McDonald", it gives you a list of McDonald nearby.
I tried the Nokia maps on my N73 because, I was tempted to buy N95 for the GPS function. However, if the map itself is not a reliable for my region, I would not consider buying it now.

Does anybody eventually know that the software on the new "navigator" phone will be the same as this smart2go?

Hello,

will this work on nokia e50?