The Nokia Beta Labs today announced the Ovi Maps beta for S60v5 with new content and services available for download and testing. With Ovi Maps, you can easily find your current location, places nearby, and addresses you are looking for, and save all your favourite places. Get to your destination safe and sound with Drive and Walk, real-time car and pedestrian navigation.

In the blog post introducing the new beta, the Maps Product Development & Marketing teams gave a short introduction to what all is new with this beta release.

All these services focus on your current location and nearby surroundings. My Position looks for your location and shows it on the map. Find places lets you search easily for cities, addresses and places with the new one-box search. Favourites allows you to save your personal map objects such as places and routes. Sign in with your Ovi account and synchronise your favourite places with Ovi to make your maps.ovi.com experience more personal. You can also synchronise your map objects from maps.ovi.com back to Maps on your device.

Our popular car navigation service, Drive, with voice and visual instructions, lane assistance and speed limit warners, comes now with text-to-speech feature for voice guidance including street names during navigation.

My personal favourite service, Walk navigation, takes you through dedicated pedestrian zones, shortcuts, stairways, plazas or pathways through parks and buildings. Now we are introducing voice guidance for Walk with voice instructions including street names during navigation.

Anywhere you go always take the weather with you, or rather real-time Weather information including a 5 day forecast for your current location or the one you go next. Additionally, check out Events for movies, concerts and venues around your location or other places you have found with the help of the Find places functionality.

For you guys, travellers and globetrotters, we’ve added premium editorial travel content by Lonely Planet andMichelin for over 1000 destinations. Find thousands of listings for sights, restaurants, hotels, shops, nightlife, and more. Look these places up on the map, and get there quickly and easily with pedestrian and car navigation.

Changes from the previous version of Maps :

• * Improved application start up
• * Brand new menu with one touch access to content and services
• * New and improved one-box search
• * New features in car navigation service: ‘Drive home’ and ‘Track me’,
• * New features in the pedestrian navigation service: ‘Walk home’ and ‘Track me’,
• * Text-to-speech for voice guidance in car and pedestrian navigation, currently available for English and German. More languages will follow for the commercial release.

You can download the sis file for the beta from this link, but first please go through the details and instructions on the Ovi Maps beta download page.