Ovi Maps opens up to devlopers with API access and Ovi SDK

Published by Ewan Spence at 9:27 UTC, September 3rd 2009

The second day of Nokia World has opened with a number of items of interest to developers. Focused on the Ovi Suite of services, two API's are being initially offered. Due to demand these are for Ovi Maps, and are the Ovi Maps Player for mobile and web; and the Ovi Navigation Player to allow you to include walk and drive navigation into third party applications. These will form core components of the new beta Ovi SDK and the new developer program which will be run via the traditional Forum Nokia.

Nokia's press release on the announcement goes into more detail, and as usual they have a video (nicely embeddable) explaining their viewpoints and what they'd like to emphasis.

Thankfully this isn't a brand new, standalone SDK for Nokia - think of it as an extension to the regular SDK available from Forum Nokia that allows you to talk to the Ovi Services, initially for the mapping services but with others to follow.

This is actually a pretty smart move from Nokia and while there will be some who say that these API features should have been included from launch, the sheer scale of the number of users of Nokia Maps then and Ovi Maps now means that there has to be a ramp up of features. The question is now whether developers will move over from using Google Maps to Ovi Maps.

More from the Forum Nokia/Ovi section.

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