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Nokia's Maps 2.0 now in Beta
posted by gywright
on Monday February 11, @12:32PM
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from the garmin-and-tomtom's-real-competitor dept.
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from the garmin-and-tomtom's-real-competitor dept.
BBC News writes about Nokia's Maps 2.0 beta release. Some exerpts from the article:
* "Nokia is taking navigation services out of the car so it can always be with you," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of the firm.
* "Nokia's announcement underlines its belief that GPS chips will become as ubiquitous in mobile phones as cameras. It has already made a $6bn (£3bn) investment in mapping company NavTeq to show that it is putting its money where its mouth is." * Mr Kallasvuo said: "Navigation is one of the foundations of the context-aware mobile phone. We believe it will be as important as voice capability was 20 years ago."
* "Nokia is taking navigation services out of the car so it can always be with you," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, president and CEO of the firm.
* "Nokia's announcement underlines its belief that GPS chips will become as ubiquitous in mobile phones as cameras. It has already made a $6bn (£3bn) investment in mapping company NavTeq to show that it is putting its money where its mouth is." * Mr Kallasvuo said: "Navigation is one of the foundations of the context-aware mobile phone. We believe it will be as important as voice capability was 20 years ago."
Related Stories
Industry: More on Nokia's Acquisition of NAVTEQ 3 comments
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As expected, the Nokia acquisition of NAVTEQ made ink flow. I'm to blame for not having linked to the official press release in my previous coverage. Amongst the reactions, here's Vector One short analysis, GeoCarta discuss how this acquisition could mean trouble for Garmin, and then there's All Points Blog extensive coverage: links to many media reactions, link to why Nokia should now buy Skype, link to why Google never considered buying NAVTEQ themselves and the impact on the price paid by TomTom for TeleAtlas.
Industry: Nokia Maps for Pedestrian and NAVTEQ's Map Reporter
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Two news item on Nokia/NAVTEQ. The first one found by Very Spatial is Nokia's plan to focus on pedestrian maps: " Halbherr declined to say how long it would take to produce a device for pedestrians after the Navteq acquisition, and admitted it would be a complicated task.
"It's the locating technology and it's the map attributes -- these need to include more precise data. For example, you want to know the exact entrances to the subway station. For a pedestrian, a distance of 50 or 60 meters is a big issue."" And the second story, via GeoMusings, is NAVTEQ's MapReporter tool to submit updates to NAVTEQ's data by the casual user. See also Tele Atlas' Map Insight and TomTom's MapShare.
Location-Based Services, TomTom, Nokia and more 3 comments
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Here's a few geonews items mainly related to cellphones and location-based services. Spatial Sustain informs us of the new "send to GPS" feature linking Google Maps and TomTom devices. Second, MacRumors discuss an Engaget story about TomTom (possibly, it's a rumor!) developing a GPS module for Apple's iPhone. Meanwhile, APB links to a NYT article wondering if Nokia can make serious inroads in the American market of cellphones and location-based services, and finally, APB runs a short entry on TeleNav and Navizon offering free small location-based services applications. Several related previous stories copied below.
Google's Android and its Location Awareness
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The Google Android mobile phone platform was featured in a few geoblogs entry since its announcement (including on Slashgeo). In an November post, Google's Ed Parsons describes the location management in Android: "With Android the Location Manager component is part of the core application framework, meaning that all user applications have access to the devices location. At a simple level this means that applications like the address book as access to the device location, so your contacts rather than sorted alphabetically could be sorted based on distance from your locations." More recently, All Points Blog informed us there is already a spatial database for Android, and even a location-based "paintball" game named WiFi Army. Development for the platform is fostered by challenges with significant prizes and several companies are jumping on the Android location bandwagon.
Android is not fully open source, from the Wikipedia page: "Android has been criticized by some because it is not really open-sourced despite what was announced by Google (some parts of the SDK are still proprietary software), and some believe it is a conscious decision to control the platform by Google." On a more or less unrelated note, Nokia, with the acquisition of Qt, may sooner than later include Google Earth on its smartphones.
Industry: A Few Words on NAVTEQ's Participation in JSR 293
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Adam Grabowski writes "Recently Mike Frey, NAVTEQ Principal Architect became involved in representing NAVTEQ on the JSR 293 Location API 2.0 expert group. JSR 293 is the follow-up to the JSR 179 Location API for Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) proposed by Nokia in 2002 and released in September 2003. JSR 293 adds services for geocoding, navigation and map display, filling out the suite of services needed to develop location-based applications on a mobile device. It increases the number of Java classes and interfaces from 13 to 40.
Participating on the JSR 293 Location API 2.0 expert group is exciting because of the opportunity to contribute to the development of a standard that will enable Java applications to run with little or no change on many different mobile devices and carriers. Download the article here — http://developer.navteq.com/getDocument.do?docId=3119. Note, requires a NN4D login."
Editor's note: we're working on giving direct access to these documents to Slashgeo registered members without the need of a separate NN4D account. This feature may however not be available until late next fall.
Landmark Based Navigation Developed by Nokia
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Last week, All Points Blog linked to an article on Nokia developing a navigating system based on image recognition.
From the article: "With landmark-based navigation you won’t even need to know your address or cross streets to get directions. You just take a picture of a nearby landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, with the camera in your mobile phone. Then, Nokia will match your photo with other landmark photos in its mapping database, and tell you where you are. Instructions to your destination are given by red arrows added to pictures, text or voice."
Related stories below include GPS phones used to identify landmarks and the Open Landmark directory.
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