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.

This also marks a shift from the one-size-fits-all static bitmap maps commonly found on the web, to using Nokia’s dynamic vector-graphic maps as a browser for all your personal map experiences – whether on the web or on your compatible mobile device.

 
Nokia also announced the release of the Ovi Maps Player API, a simple way to embed the rich and dynamic Ovi Maps experience into any compatible website using basic JavaScript. This opens the Ovi Maps service and technology for third parties wishing to add greater contextual innovation to their websites for a deeper level of integration, sharing and collaboration with their audiences. Now websites like lonelyplanet.com or social networking sites can include Ovi Maps which can be personalized with their users’ collections of content and then synchronized onto their compatible mobile device.
 
“Ovi Maps is evolving from a consumer service to a live and dynamic platform for location-based services and content shared between the mobile device and the web. By adding this richer dimension to Ovi Maps we are both creating new experiences for consumers and new opportunities for developers,” says Michael Halbherr, vice president, Social Location services at Nokia. “The Ovi Maps Player API offers an open and easy-to-use map browser based on simple web technologies that can be embedded into any website. This is the first step toward an ecosystem where developers can access Nokia’s unique contextual assets, such as location, to create mobile applications that will redefine how we use our mobile device. “

 

On my regular visits to the paediatric unit in my hospital I usually take some goodies for the kids there which enable me to diverge their attention from my white collar and helps me to carry out the physical examination and record their history, but most importantly this puts a smile on their face . If you feel that paediatrics is easy then you are completely wrong. Making a correct diagnosis of patients who are unable to speak and tell you what their problem is, is a real hard job.

It was on one of these occasions that I decided to take along these Mapsters toys that I had received. My first case was a 6 year old boy with fever and running nose, but his mother kept pointing out that he was very naughty. So in order to make things easy I deliberately had put one of these toys on my table within the reach of my patient. I was expecting this would make him reach out for it and eventually will make him feel relaxed which will help me with my work. And guess what! He did reach out for the toy and did look at it with eyes wide open. Before I could tell him about the toy, he dropped the box and started crying. I was totally taken aback by this and quickly hid the toy and asked his mother to hold him.

So with that said, my first case was not at all receptive to the Mapsters toy and thus I had a little hard time with him. I guess, he was a little scared coming to the hospital (most of the kids are because they relate hospitals to vaccinations and needle pricks) but eventually I did manage to tell him about the toy and I gave the toy to his mother and he was really happy. He asked if he could take it home and I told him that he certainly could. After a little pause he again asked if he could have it and I said yes. He was so cheered up. His mother asked him to say thank you which he did with a new wave of excitement in his eyes. I added that my friends from UK had sent this specially for him and if he stays like a good boy then he will get another one . Thus, on a final note these toys were really loved by kids and they were totally lost in them. So it is now official that are the most crushed toys ever.

Not all kids were like this; a couple of them really loved these toys from their first look and were so into them that they forgot they were in a hospital. At the end of the day seeing all of them happy made me feel happy too. But I was also feeling sad as the last kid whom I gave the toy was HIV+ but seeing him smile gave me a sense of satisfaction.

Thank You Nokia!

I am still waiting for Nokia to expand their coverage in India. But things don’t seem to be working. Recently Google Maps added a whole lot of new Indian towns to its coverage and at the moment it’s the only one that has proved to be of some help for me .

How to get My Free Trial*?

To activate your free navigation trial (E71, N78, and N82):

1. Open Nokia Maps on your device

2. Select Options >Extras
3. Select Drive & Walk
4. Select Download
5. Select region, click OK

To activate your free navigation trial (N96, N95 8GB, and N95):

1. Open Nokia Maps on your device
2. Select Options >Extra Services
3. Select Add Navigation
4. Select Purchase

Following is the device trial time. for more info visit http://www.nokiausa.com/A41369058

I know a lot of us do have the high end Nokia phones that come with an inbuilt GPS and the Nokia Maps Software but we have hardly explored it. The same was with me until lately when I accidently opened the application and gave it a shot. So after using it for about a month today I finally sat down to write about it in detail. Now it was an intentional accident and I’m glad it happened as I was on vacation being unfamiliar with the neighbourhood made me feel a little insecure. Simply, you feel more in place when you know your way around and professionally it saves you a lot of time. So here is a Real Time Experience of Nokia Maps & GPS bundled together to see if the Navigation is worth or just another money minting technique by Nokia.

The events hereafter are based on my experiences with S60 based Nokia N95 8GB with the inbuilt GPS and Nokia Maps application.

1. LOADING

So it was time to get myself familiar with the neighbourhood and plan for a few outdoor events too. I clicked on the icon of the Nokia Maps, which displayed the following screen showing the Maps to be loading. It took exactly 6 seconds to load 100%, which is not bad at all.

2. ACQUIRING LOCATION

As soon as the home screen loads, three yellow dots start to flash one at a time going from left to right indicating that the GPS is trying to access the satellite in order to display your current position. Once the GPS acquires your current position, it registers it by displaying all three dots as Green and you can locate yourself by just pressing the 0 (Zero) button which will take you to your current location which is displayed on the map in a + sign. Now it was a pretty dicey for me as sometimes the GPS worked really quick and sometimes it took a little while, but on whole it gave me a satisfactory experience in terms of showing you your current position, after all you can’t compare a Cell Phone to offer you the likes of a GARMIN or TomTom. But once it acquired your location, it then functioned pretty smooth.

3. THE OFFSIDE RULE

Before we go any further i would like to add (a little offside) that even if your phone does not have an inbuilt GPS, you can still carry around Nokia Maps application on your s60 or s40 enabled cell phone and download Maps for free an view them using the Nokia Maps Loader. So in this way you will have all the Maps you need with you that you can view offline, a pretty amazing feature (but you need a huge memory card or the 8GB memory to preload all the maps.) Only thing you would miss out on is Navigation. Now coming back to the main part, the reason why I started this post was to tell you about Naivigation and a real time experience with the GPS.

Some N95 8GB versions in some countries come with a free trial of Nokia Maps with Voice Guided Navigation for a limited period of time and as for me I didn’t get one, even though my box said that I had a free trial, so the first Negative score and that too a big one as I so wanted to have a go at it. If you too are in my shoes, then don’t worry as you can always pay some money to get a Liscence Or keep Reading this to know how you can get a demo of the Voice guidance. To know more about costs and pricing click here. You can also buy City Guides, which will tell you about various locations of a city viz. Food, Theater, Malls, Banks, Clubs, Hotels etc.

4. FEATURES & SHORTCUTS

Navigation with voice guidance is by far a hit and a miss feature but pretty good considering that it is an early effort by Nokia. Ability to have your personal Landmarks on Maps is also pretty cool and time efficient feature. You can also save Map as an image. Alternative Route Selection, Choice between fastest/shortest routes, Nearby search, etc are a few more to mention.

Following are a few shortcuts with screenshots i have found while using Nokia Maps and they have been really useful.

0 (Zero) = GPS Position

* = Zoom In

# = Zoom Out

1 = Switch Between 2D/3D Modes while in Navigation

2 = Change background Between Light/Dark while in Navigation

3 = Send Map via test, bluetooth, e-mail or multimedia message

6 = Recieving Satellite Status

7 = Increase/Decrease Volume of Voice Guided Navigation

Also you can search a keyword by pressing any numeric key (apart 0) in the default home screen.

5. THE NAVIGATION

From the Screenshots above it would be pretty cleat that how efficient the navigation system is, telling you exactly what route to take. To use the navigation all you have to do is to select Options>Use this place>Route from and then just punch in the place you want to go and select Search Route. The application according to your settings will give you the fastest/shortest route between the two places with a set of complete instructions. Once the route is displayed, you can select Options>Start Navigation. The navigation screen will appear which on top bar will display the nest street to turn on. On top left it will display the direction of the turn you need to take with the distance to go. The bottom part will display the current street you are on below which your will be your car speed total distance to go and time passed. The ‘N’ with the white arrow is the compass pointing towards the north direction and the three green dots is the GPS. The voice only tells you to make a turn and after what distance, but it does not speak the street names. You can also use the Simulation mode to have an experiience of the real time voice enabled demo of the navigation system. During my use the Navigation was Spot on most of the time. The GPS followed us through, only missing out in tunnels and sometimes in downtown and when the phone’s lights went off.

The battery consumption was nominal as it is expected to be but surprisingly gave more backup from the regular GARMIN nuvi 660 after one complete charge to total die out. The overall performance was a bit slow. The routes were accurate almost every time.

6. THE ADVANTAGES

1. Portable
2. Offline Maps Available
3. Good Batter Life
4. Accurate Coverage
5. Pedestrian Mode
6. Live Traffic Feeds (Limited)
7. Nearby Places
8. Can be used any car
9. Additional Features – Phone, Text Message, Camera, Video, Songs(MP3), Internet, Games etc.

7. THE DISADVANTAGES

1. A Little SLOW
2. Expensive
3. Complicated GUI (Graphic User Interface)
4. Small Screen
5. No Street Names in Voice Guided Navigation
6. Not Global
7. Only Few Handsets are Compatible

8. FINAL VERDICT

You can’t beat the fact that it is not only a GPS device but a phone as well, despite a few drawbacks, i would rate it a “BIG Thumbs Up” to Nokia for providing a complete package with a rating of 8.0/10 overall. So the money minting text i wrote in the opening paragraph has been drained down as the device comes with descent quality of service on which I’m satisfied. On a final note, i personally love this application and recommend it to all. To really know what it is like you guys should give it a try and I’m sure it will totally take you in the drivers seat for a long drive to explore new boundaries.

For More Info On Nokia Maps Click Here>>