In this interview, recorded in Barcelona at MWC 2010, we talk to Christof Hellmis, Director Navigation & Routing Solutions at Nokia, about Ovi Maps and Nokia's location strategy. It is clear that location has an enormously important role to play as a key enabler in the future of mobile - and this piece will give you an insight to Nokia's viewpoints and attitudes. We cover the story behind the recent release of the Ovi Maps 3.3 with free navigation, potential future improvements to Ovi Maps, the Ovi Developer SDK, future directions and much more.
Read on in the full article.
I think Ovi Maps is getting there. It keeps improving slowly and steadily. But the way Nokia handled this free navigation thing could have been a lot better.
On Nokia's home page there's a big banner that says "Navigation on your Nokia. For free. Forever". But nowhere it says that if you have any but one of the latest handset, it's not free at all. If I select the Maps version for my N82 it doesn't tell me that free navigation isn't available. And if I happen to know that I do have to pay and I want to check how much it'll cost me (which I do, I'm traveling in 2 weeks), the Pricing page redirects me to the Download page.
I have to say that customer support is still Nokia's weakest link.
-Nico
Good interview, though I wish you had asked him about integrating Ovi Maps on a Nokia handset with all the other functions and applications.
For example, the Gig Finder app; why can't Ovi Maps tie into this? Or Contacts---click on a name and see what real life traffic patterns are to their address. This isn't a bridge too far; Google Navigation does this NOW. On an Android phone, every app ties into, and works in conjunction with every other application. Imagine a chain, or a web, linking one application to the other and vice versa.
Using Gig Finder as an example again: if you find a venue for an artist, there should be a prompt to hear the artist's new release on Mobbler/Sotify/Pandora, and the OS should troll your music library to see if a track is available.
if they are not able to upgrade ovi maps to older devices, they could-should make the license for maps 3.0 free - immidiately.
i'm afraid, however, that nokia once again is trying to bend the truth.
I read on symbian60.mobi an german Blog that the new pricing modell for older devices is out. Now you pay only 10 Euro for a one year navigation license. I think thats a fair price.
Imagine people with older Nokia devices get free Navigation and use their devices only for Navigation and buy an Iphone or Android device. Nokia won't people do that.
Sorry my poor english.
@Jimmy1
I think co-operation of OVI maps and other applications are being made possible with the OVI SDK.
Why hasn't the N86 been officially supported yet?
Jimmy1 wrote:Good interview, though I wish you had asked him about integrating Ovi Maps on a Nokia handset with all the other functions and applications.
This level of integration is on the roadmap. However it will not happen overnight or all at once (the latest version of Ovi Maps has address lookup in Contacts from within Ovi Maps (but not vice versa yet). The integration of Ovi Maps into third party apps is theoretically possible now, but not many applications choose to use it. The Ovi Developer SDK will clearly make things a lot easier here too.
But yes I agree this is exactly the sort of thing we need to see more of. A good example of your music one is for Shazam and Midomi, which both do link into the Music Store (especially good if you're on CwM).
Pawlee wrote:Why hasn't the N86 been officially supported yet?
I imagine there is a technical reason for this. As other have noted, if your desperate for free, you can download another S60 3.2 version and it seems to work.
Unregistered wrote:
I think Ovi Maps is getting there. It keeps improving slowly and steadily. But the way Nokia handled this free navigation thing could have been a lot better.On Nokia's home page there's a big banner that says "Navigation on your Nokia. For free. Forever". But nowhere it says that if you have any but one of the latest handset, it's not free at all. If I select the Maps version for my N82 it doesn't tell me that free navigation isn't available. And if I happen to know that I do have to pay and I want to check how much it'll cost me (which I do, I'm traveling in 2 weeks), the Pricing page redirects me to the Download page.
I have to say that customer support is still Nokia's weakest link.
-Nico
I think people under-estimate the difficulty in doing something like this for multiple older handsets across many different product families. Ovi Maps is actually the best I've seen from Nokia in terms of supporting older handsets (in general).
But I do agree there's defintely room for extra clarity on the website (thanks for your observations on this). I suspect it may be a resource issue (i.e. how many people fall into each segment - I suspect the number of onwers of older devices trying to download this are relatively small compared to more recent handset owners).
Rafe wrote:I think people under-estimate the difficulty in doing something like this for multiple older handsets across many different product families.
They underestimated it too. From http://events.nokia.com/ovimaps/index.html :
Until today, Navigation has been kept in the hands of the few. Today that changes. We realised that billions of people around the world already have mobile phones that are perfectly suited to delivering Navigation. So we’re going to let them do that. From this day on, Navigation on your Nokia, with Ovi Maps, will be free for everyone, everywhere, to get people to the places they love. Now, and forever.
It looks to me like they bit off more than they could chew. Same old Nokia that releases a billion handsets with a billion product codes each and then can't keep up with software upgrades.
That rather depends on how you interpret that sentence... If you;re going to take a negative view I don't anything I say will change your mind.