The future of Nokia Maps?

[slitchfield]

Nokia's in-house Conversations team are doing a good job of outing the Nokia promotional videos. The one embedded below shows 'the future of Nokia Maps' and seems to promote the 'social location' theme from yesterday, with concept screens showing real time presence of your contacts, on both the phone and on Maps on Ovi. It remains to be seen whether Nokia Chat or FriendView are used in the implementation, or whether Maps is growing its own presence code... Video after the break.

Read on in the full article.

[bartmanekul]

I cant help but be annoyed with this.

Stop with all the social addons please Nokia, and made the foundations solid.

Maps is supposed to be navigation software, and it's still trailing far, far behind the competition, and is expensive to boot.

Maps beta 3 is even more depressing. Where is the most commonly used features of satnav? Custom POI? Speed camera alerts? Proper send location to a friend? Decent traffic integration?

All of these are reasonably easy to add, and yet we see no sign of them in the 3rd major version of Nokia Maps.

And it looks to be still dependant on a data connection, otherwise you find very few results (if any) in offline mode.

And yet the subscription price is still very high, especially compared to competitors.

The beta has also been ridden with errors, crashes and is generally unstable. I hope the final version of Maps 3 is not as unreliable and buggy as 2 is.

The future of Nokia Maps? For the time being, it's very poor.

[slitchfield]

In Nokia's defence (though goodness knows it's hard to defend the state of the current beta), I don't think they're aiming to replace in-car sat-navs - they're veering more towards personal, car-independent navigation, hooking up you to the real world and your contacts.

A very different focus to the TomToms of this world. Probably room in the market for both!

[bartmanekul]

True, but then there is not any real reason for Nokia to avoid that market if they can draw it in.

Nokia Maps is advertised as incar satnav, and as such should have at least the most basic features of it.

And they should be aiming to - because they easily have the power too.

They own Navteq - only rivalled by Teleatlas. It's not like they dont have everything they need at their disposal.

I just cannot see any sense in that idea - why keep it aimed as a social tool only when they could so easily challenge Garmin, Copilot etc.

And dare I say it, TomTom.

It's says something that almost everyone I know does not use their phone for social networking, while lots would like to use it for navigation. Unfortunatly, Nokia Maps is, quite frankly, rubbish.

Even if you ignore all the missing features, Maps 2 is not reliable enough (especially considering its made by Nokia, who own Navteq, Symbian, and make the phones!!), and has a suprising amount of bugs.

And the menu system - still awful, in beta3. Arrrghh.

Nokia can carry on with the social side of it, those who want to use it will do so. But they will never get any money off me for Maps while it's such a poor effort, and I know many that feel the same.

It's just an incredibly stupid move by Nokia when with such little effort - making it run reliably and adding a few very basic features - it could contend with other satnavs, and make most people content and feel the subscription fee is actually worth it.

I know of so very many people that would use it if it had custom POI. A possible addition of 1000s of users by adding one simple feature.

[snoyt]

Originally Posted by bartmanekul

I cant help but be annoyed with this.

Stop with all the social addons please Nokia, and made the foundations solid.

Though I do agree on the points about Maps 3, do take in mind it is called a beta version, not a prerelease or gamma version. I do disagree about the social addons. I would love to see the Nokia's get more suave in the the supportive role my phone performs and could perform for my social interaction with friends and collegues.

[bartmanekul]

I don't disagree with the social addons, but I do not think they should be added with Maps 2 in such an unreliable status.

If it works with Maps 3 smoothly, fine. But I am betting we will see all the same problems as 2, perhaps exabberated by the social addons.

Although I won't use them, I don't mind if they are there. I just think it's daft to pile more stuff on top when the base is flawed.

[bartmanekul]

Ah, and if they are not aiming to replace incar satnavs, why add things like lane guidance?

[snoyt]

Originally Posted by bartmanekul

Ah, and if they are not aiming to replace incar satnavs, why add things like lane guidance?

To see if the cab driver isn't scamming you B*) ?

[Ratkat]

I don't think the subscription cost will ever be worth it, you can buy a dedicated TomTom One for less than £90 now, £60 for Nokia maps is just too expensive.

Bring it down to £20 a year and i'd be tempted, it's not all bad, routing can be a bit weird, but then so is TomTom's now and again.

[Arthur]

God this is annoying. Enough with the social addons bloat.

Nokia wake up: I don't want or need to know where my damn contacts are !!! I never did in the past, I don't now, and will never do in the future!!!

You want to know why this will be a huge failure: not enough people will use it except for a few geeks. Who cares ???? Give me a break... who will use this crap in the real world? Be honest.

Give me proper navigation instead.

[bartmanekul]

Dispite a few (very few) saying that the social add ons might be a good idea, I havent actually seen anyone saying they will use it.

[BDSawicki]

I think Nokia is going strange direction... (reading comments above I gather I am not the only one).

I also would prefer Nokia Maps to offer a decent sat-nav rather than social something.

And it is the same as regards the PIM (for me still the key application). Even equipped with Handy Calendar (let alone Papyrus which although in terms of features is great is unstable and constantly in neverending development) I could not decently organise my tasks on the go (I have a huge number, not 10 or 15, as I use the tasks app heavily). The built-in calendar app by Nokia is of course a crap comparing to nothing (8 years ago I would love it, but it was 8 years ago...).

So tired waiting for a sensible solution from Nokia, I finally left my e90 and switched to... iPhone two months ago.

And it really kicks - I found a brilliant task manager (Omnifocus - I mention it because it does deserve it), which is available both for Mac and iPhone and I finally can have in my pocket (on iPhone) what I have on my Mac (rather than, as it was with Nokia, some poor imitation of a PC/Mac calendar application). And MobileMe provides levels of synchronisation Nokia/Ovi users can only dream of...

It has been almost two years since Nokia released the e90 - and, save my mistake, I see no developments in the PIM application both at Nokia and with the developers...

Instead, a lot of - useless for me - features continue appear. Widgets, blogs etc.

But I guess I simply am no target consumer for Nokia...