Nokia’s Ovi Maps for Mobile and Web
by Renee Blodgett on June 19, 2009 at 8:58 pm
As part of our prep for London, we met with the Nokia Ovi Maps team late last month to learn a bit more about their mobile and web apps. Ovi maps allow you to see the world in new ways with 3D, satellite and terrain views, weather, information and more.
Features include collections, which allow you to collect and store your favorite routes or destinations for quick and easy access. You can also search for new places from restaurants to remote towns and the service helps you with routing prior to your trip as well as navigation on-the-ground.
You can do all your pre-planning on the desktop if you’d like, save your favorites into collections, and then sync up with your mobile device so you can later navigate using the same information when you arrive at your final destination.
They currently have 216 cities worldwide and 30 landmarks per city. “If you do a really deep dive into the maps, you may not really want to see labels, but its something you can turn on and off easily depending on your preference,” said Berlin-based Jörg Malang, head of Ovi Maps for Nokia.
There’s also a very cool terrain view which gives you views of mountains and landscape.
Maps 3.0, the latest version, which came out in the first quarter of this year, includes hi-resolution satellite and terrain maps in 2D and 3D views and you can walk with enhanced pedestrian routing and features.
You can download updated maps for free anytime from over the 200 countries and of those 200, roughly 74 are navigable today (meaning you can do real-time pedestrian and car navigation in those countries).
You can also share locations with your friends but you can’t yet export or have multiple profiles, that is if you don’t want those two profiles to be synced with each other. Sharing features are coming in the not too distant future however.
