Nokia announce Maps on Ovi

Published by Steve Litchfield at 6:19 UTC, May 13th 2008

Yesterday at Where 2.0, Nokia announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to to complement Nokia Maps 2.0. As part of the Ovi brand, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you're already out on the road, you can record routes and points of interest on your handset and then upload them to the Ovi service when you return home to share with family and friends. More details and a screenshot below. Comments welcome!

The detail in this news post is from Crave, who report:

"We got a brief demo of Maps on Ovi, and it looks very cool. Despite being booted off the hotel's Wi-Fi and some technical glitches with search (the service isn't even in beta yet), we can already see the benefits of such a service. The obvious benefit is not having to sit there and peck out addresses on your phone's alphanumeric dialpad, and it's especially helpful when you're planning a multi-destination trip. The synchronization from the Web to the phone was smooth. Plus, we like the sharing aspect of Maps on Ovi, and this is a point that Nokia emphasized during our briefing.

Michael Halbherr, vice president of context-based services at Nokia, said now it's not so much about route calculation (since that part of the technology is pretty solid) as it is about what we can do with the data. The next step is about discovering, collecting, and sharing those experiences. And this is certainly something I can get onboard with. Having covered portable navigation systems for the past two years, I find that most models offer the same core functions (text- and voice-guided directions, points of interest database, etc.) and do them reasonably well, so now the challenge is to find services that will further improve the driver's or walker's experience (and I don't mean adding multimedia features, people!)"

(via The Symbian Blog)

Categories: Software, Links of Interest, Events
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition

Quote:

Originally Posted by krisse I think they'll probably want to integrate and launch it first. At the moment it's still four separate services: Twango (aka Ovi Share), N-Gage, Nokia Maps and Nokia Music, all with separate logins. The Ovi.com page still talks about the launch being in the future, so at the moment Ovi is little more than a brand used by the sharing service.

Fair enough. I had come to think that it was launched already, what with all the talk about it - that's why I decided to check it out.

Quote:

To give them credit though, Nokia Music Store has been launched in many languages on a country-by-country basis, with local musical acts on each store's front page and the interface translated entirely into the local language.

Sounds fine, until I decided to check out Singapore's one and was presented with :

Code:

Nokia Music does not currently support the Mozilla Firefox (Mac OS X) browser on your operating system

Supported systems are currently Microsoft Windows XP or Vista

Supported browsers on the above systems are currently Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and above

To find out more information on Nokia Music Store and information about accessing the store through your Nokia devices have a look at the Nseries Music pages

If the problem persists, then click here and tell us which page you are trying to view.

Sigh.

Which, IMO, is totally unacceptable. They might as well make dedicated client s/w if they restrict web pages to only one (or two) OSes.

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