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Tag: ovi-maps

  • Nokia N8 Offcially for Sale at the end of September

    Nokia finally announced that Nokia N8, the company’s long-awaited, flagship handset, will be on-sale in the last week of September for £429 SIM free or on contract from £35 per month.

    The Nokia N8 introduces a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, HD-quality (720p) video recording, film editing software and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound.

    Among the features of this Symbian^3 smartphone are:

    • On-demand Web TV (CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic and others)
    • HDMI connection
    • Navigation with Ovi Maps
    • Up to three personalised home screens
    • Integrated social networking: all social networks in a single app
    • Flick scrolling and pinch-to-zoom
    • Ovi apps
    • 3.5 inch widescreen (640 x 360 pixels) capacitive touch
    • 6GB mass memory + micro SD card slot, 135MB internal memory, support up to 32GB memory cards
    • 1200mAh BL-4D battery

    "The Nokia N8 is perfect for creating and sharing great content in high-definition, using HDMI out to connect to your TV as well as hot-USB swap. We’re making it fun and easy to capture and share memorable moments on the go," said Mark Loughran, General Manager, Nokia UK.

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  • What Does Nokia’s Launch of Free Navigation Mean to the Market?

    On 21 January 2010, Nokia announced that it is to make turn-by-turn navigation free with its Ovi Maps offering. The research firm Canalys claims the move is a logical one for Nokia to take, especially in light of the recent launch of Google’s free navigation solution.

    Google’s navigation currently supports only Android devices and is confined to the United States – though Canalys expects both of these limitations to be addressed this year.

    “As Google’s free solution becomes more widely available, it will inevitably have a negative impact on consumers’ willingness to pay for navigation, making it increasingly hard for application providers to charge for their solutions. Yet Nokia’s move should be viewed less as a defensive measure and more as it going on the offensive,” state Canalys.

    “It already has the necessary assets in-house, with its own navigation software, ownership of Navteq, and a huge, growing installed base of GPS-integrated smart phones. In making its own solution free now, it has a head start over Google and any other vendor that follows in every supported market except the US, giving it time to firmly associate itself with the concept of free navigation through promotional activity.”

    Canalys’ end-user research has repeatedly shown that navigation is a feature that consumers want on their mobile phones. Being the first to make global navigation free across so wide a portfolio of devices will give Nokia handsets a true value-add and help it differentiate its products in the increasingly competitive smart phone space, according to the research group.

    Alanysts predict Nokia’s free navigation announcement will not be welcomed though by all its mobile operator partners.

    “While some are happy to endorse or support services that help encourage data consumption, many offer chargeable GPS navigation services themselves, albeit with varying success outside the US, and may well be reluctant to support a move that encourages consumers to expect navigation and other mobile content and services for free, eroding potential revenue streams,” says Canalys.

    According to the analysis, Nokia’s announcement may conceivably push more operators into partnerships with third-party navigation solution providers, where navigation is bundled with the cost of a data plan, providing their own effectively free navigation solutions with an incentive for customers to sign up to data plans, while maintaining customer ownership advantages.

    “Similarly, handset competitors may consider entering into deeper, closer relationships with selected navigation software vendors to offer their own bundled or free solutions. This would minimize Nokia’s ability to use navigation as a differentiator and enable them to also take advantage of the growing consumer appetite for, and expectation of, having free navigation available on smart phones out-of-the-box,” states Canalys.

    That it may prompt operators and some of Nokia’s competitors to pay more attention to their own navigation partner relationships.

    Canalys analysts claim the most significant impact for navigation vendors will likely be the effect that a widespread Nokia advertising campaign will have on consumers and their willingness to pay for navigation.

    "All providers will come under substantial pressure to reduce prices, and few consumers will be happy to pay the kind of prices that vendors such as TomTom or Navigon are currently able to command through application stores,” thay say.

  • Nokia to Offer Free Turn-by-Turn Navigation

    Nokia makes walk and drive navigation free on its smartphones. Starting today, the company offers a new version of Ovi Maps that includes turn-by-turn navigation with voice guidance for 74 countries, in 46 languages, and traffic information for more than 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries and 6000 3D landmarks for 200 cities around the world.

    The important news is that there is no network connection required when navigating: earlier pre-loaded on to the phone, the maps also work in offline mode, which means users don’t have to be worried about international roaming costs when traveling. That should also extend battery life.

    This game-changing move has the potential to nearly double the size of the current mobile navigation market and makes Nokia the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world.

    "Why have multiple devices that work that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market," explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President at Nokia.

    "The large-scale availability of free-of-charge mobile phone navigation offerings using high-quality map data will be a game changer for the navigation industry," said Thilo Koslowski, Vice President Automotive and Vehicle ICT at Gartner.

    "Such offerings will accelerate mass market adoption for navigation solutions and shift innovation focus to location-based services that go beyond traditional routing benefits."

    For Nokia, removing the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians allows the company to quickly activate a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services.

    Nokia says this is part of its strategy to lead the market in mobile maps, navigation and location-based services. The move is also in line with Nokia’s vision that the next wave of growth will be centered on the location-aware, social internet — as the ‘where’ people are doing things becomes as important as the ‘what’ they are doing.

    According to research firm Canalys, the number of people worldwide using GPS navigation on their mobile phones was approximately 27 million at the end of 2009. With this announcement Nokia potentially grows the size of this installed user base to about 50 million by enabling smartphone owners, with compatible devices and devices that will be made compatible shortly to activate free drive and walk navigation through a simple download of the new Ovi Maps.

    Nokia will further grow this base as it adds more smartphones to the compatible devices list.

    Canalys also estimated in 2009 that the installed base of smartphones with integrated GPS was 163 million units worldwide, of which Nokia accounted for more than half (51%) having shipped cumulatively 83 million GPS devices.

    "By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones we quickly became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. The aim of the new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation," adds Vanjoki.

    Ovi Maps is immediately available for download for 10 Nokia handsets (including N97 mini, 5800 XpressMusic and E72), with more Nokia smartphones expected to be added in the coming weeks.

    The company informed that from March 2010, new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost.

  • Nokia Launches X6 ‘Comes With Music’ Device

    NOKIA WORLD 09. Nokia announced the launch of the new Nokia X6, the latest edition to the company’s Xseries touch-screen device portfolio.

    Nokia calls X6 a ‘Comes With Music’ device, as it provides unlimited access to the Nokia Music Store, 35 hours of music playback, comes with built-in FM radio, 3D stereo ringing tones, a new Bluetooth headset, that looks like a cool, sporty headband and dedicated pocket-size battery-powered mini speaker.

    This very slim (14mm) handset features stroke-sensitive, 3.2 inch 16:9 widescreen nHD, that enables to fit 20 shortcuts onto a home screen, 32GB internal memory, 5 megapixels with Carl-Zeiss optics and dual LED flash, built-in features to edit videos, show them on TV or online, built-in GPS with Assisted GPS (A-GPS) support, compass and Nokia Ovi Maps.

    It packs high speed MicroUSB connector, WLAN (China WAPI), Bluetooth 2.0, WCDMA, GPRS/EDGE, HSDPA connectivity and full web browser (OSS) v7.0 with Macromedia Flash Lite 3.0

    The Nokia X6 is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2009 for an estimated retail price of EUR459.

  • Nokia Unveils N900 – The New Company’s Flagship Handset

    Nokia has finally launched the N900 – running on the new Maemo 5 latest company’s smartphone, which has evolved from Nokia’s previous generation of internet tablets.

    “The open source, Linux-based Maemo software delivers a PC-like experience on a handset-sized device” says the company’s announcement.

    Nokia N900 packs an ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz processor, up to 1GB of application memory and 3D graphics accelerator with OpenGL ES 2.0 support. The result is, as the company promises, “PC-like multitasking, allowing many applications to run simultaneously.”

    New Nokia comes with a 3.5-inch 800×480 pixel touchscreen, the full physical slide-out QWERTY, internet connectivity with 10/2 HSPA and WLAN, Wi-Fi 54Mbps data transfer, Mozilla-based browser and full Adobe Flash 9.4 support.

    To get the most out of the 5MP camera, Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash and 800 × 480 resolution video recording, Maemo software and the N900 come with a new tag cloud user interface.

    The device also features GPS with pre-installed Ovi Maps, Bluetooth 2.1, FM transmitter, TV-out and 1320mAh battery.

    The panoramic homescreen can be fully personalized with shortcuts, widgets and applications. Maemo software updates happen automatically over the internet.

    N900 has 32GB of storage, which is expandable up to 48GB via a microSD card.

    "The Nokia N900 shows where we are going with Maemo and we’ll continue to work with the community to push the software forward. What we have with Maemo is something that is fusing the power of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone, and it is great to see that it is evolving in exciting ways," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President of Nokia.

    Nokia N900 will be available in select markets from October 2009 with an estimated retail price of EUR 500 and will be displayed at Nokia World, Stuttgart, on September 2.