This, then is a followup to the Maps 2.0 Preview, so make sure you read that first!
With regard to my accusation that Nokia has removed the obvious ability to do route calculation, it was confirmed to me that the routing function has not been removed: "You can still route through the add menu. Simply click on 'add' and then select 'route' and you will be put into routing menu, where you can add any number of waypoints and calculate and view routes." The Maps team did admit though that the user interface may be at fault here and that work still needed to be done, but defended themselves saying that they wanted to clean up the menu and "make room for more stuff to come".
Although I generally felt that route calculation in Maps 2.0 was good enough, the Nokia Maps team said that "for the final product, we will move to a new middleware which should have most of the routing issues fixed", promising that routing will also be faster. It's not clear whether they were talking about the final version of v2.0 or some future version x of the product, but faster and more accurate is always better, so no complaints here.
With respect to my criticism that the satellite images were worse than those in rival products (e.g. Google Maps), the Maps team commented that their rivals were using aerial photos (i.e. from planes) a lot of the time, and that the licensing of these is "far from trivial" when talking about millions of devices". I get the impression that money isn't the issue here but simply the legal niceties and that aerial photos will be added in time. One feature I didn't spot was that the "satellite images actually rotate in pedestrian mode" as you walk along, something that's currently unique to Nokia Maps 2.0.
I commented that the accuracy of pedestrian routing was hampered by the lack of footpath detail in the maps and the Nokia Maps team responded that this data is still being gathered by Navteq (previous nav products have only been concerned with road/car data, of course) and that pedestrian-specific data would make its way into the downloadable country maps in due course.
With all our coverage of Ovi, I was interested to see the Nokia Maps team mention that "we are going to launch maps.ovi.com, a companion web site, which will allow users to pre-plan trips on the web and/or view mobile-collected landmarks and routes", hinting that this would be live before the summer. There would obviously also be a free Maps 2.x upgrade to allow users to seamlessly synchronize favorites with the new server.
Interestingly, the Maps team talked about six "experience clusters": drive, walk, discover, collect, share and meet. As Nokia Maps evolves, we can presumably expect more functions to allow sharing (of locations and stuff [e.g. photos, videos] associated with locations) and meeting (coordinating locations between two or more incidences of Maps?)
You'll have seen in our news items on Nokia's free Location Tagger tool, that Maps is already integrated into this, and we can expect more integration with other apps in the future, with the Maps team talking of helping Ovi to "deliver a full-featured context-aware internet platform".
Developers should note that the Nokia Maps team intend to open up the Maps data and functions, "making a rich set of APIs available to programmers and content suppliers". Which is good and will help application integration all the more, although there's no indication yet as to the timescale involved for this.
It's clear that the task ahead for the Maps team is a big one. The sheer number of countries and data suppliers involved makes it a nightmare, I can imagine. Nokia claim that they are "selling close to 400 different products in over 100 countries across 270 different operators".
Thanks for taking the time to email me, guys, but it's back to work now, you've got a lot to do!
Steve Litchfield, AllAboutSymbian, 27 Feb 2008