Hi,
I'd like to hear about the experience of others with Nokia Maps on the E90 because so far I've found so bad that it's completely unusable for me. So I'm wondering if I'm not doing something wrong with it or if I misunderstood its purpose.
The first thing I did was to install the PC application and load all the maps I needed on the memory card that was supplied with the phone. That part was easy and painless. I liked the way countries were divided into regions so that you could only load the regions you actually needed to save space on the memory card. That's unfortunately the only good thing I've found about Nokia Maps.
My first problem with it is that I couldn't find any explicit way to switch on or off the GPS. It seems that Nokia Maps automatically connects to the GPS when it launches but it does so in the background without telling you anything and without giving any feedback about how the process is going on. So you never know whether you've got a GPS lock or not. There's this Satellite Info option in the menu but that just displays a list of numbers with bars which is like Chinese to me. I suppose that it's a list of all the satellites in sight and some sort of "signal strength" but it displays the same thing regardless of whether it's got a lock or not. So is there a way to monitor the progress of the GPS lock?
Regardless of whether Nokia Maps has a GPS lock or not, the bottom (or right) soft-key is labeled "GPS pos.". If you select it before a GPS lock was acquired, the application doesn't tell you that no GPS location is available. Instead, it just throws to a random location on the map (presumably to the last location where it had a lock the last time you used the app). Is it just me or is this completely stupid?
Even ignoring this completely random and confusing GPS behavior, the rest of the application isn't any better. Scrolling through the maps on the internal screen is so painfully slow that it makes the app pretty much unusable. On the external screen, scrolling is much faster but it still feels really sluggish and quite painful to use.
Another totally confusing "feature" is the way the route planner works. Whenever you plan a route, the list of turns is displayed on the screen. Fine. You can then switch to the map view. Fine. But when you actually want to start planning your route, things start to go wrong. The map view won't let you scroll at all. All you can do is jump from turn to turn. And zoom in or out above a turn. This means that you can't easily get a visual overview of the route you're going to take or, for example, find the street name of the last left turn before the one you're supposed to take. It all makes it very frustrating and pretty useless.
What I really don't get is that I installed Google Maps as well and it's so much better than Nokia Maps it's not even funny. How can Google get it so right and Nokia so wrong? The only problem about Google Maps is that it doesn't have an in-car navigation system which is why I'd still like to get Nokia Maps to work properly.
Apart from that, using Google Maps is a real pleasure. It zips through the maps with ease on both the internal and external screen, has a very simple and intuitive UI that never gets in your way and whenever things aren't quite obvious, helpful contextual help pops-up in a very nice non-obtrusive way and let you know what your options are. A solid and well thought out application.
So would you have any tricks to get Nokia Maps to work for me or is it just hopeless?