Day 3 of SXSW and the brilliant folks at WOM World had something incredibly awesome planned – the Ovi Maps Route Race. The idea was simple – navigate around Austin with Ovi Maps. The fun part was that we were going to be doing it on Segways and on a ‘confrence bike’. The experience was incredible, but that’s not really why I am writing this post. It is to share the navigation experience.

As you are aware, Ovi Maps navigation just went free worldwide for quite a number of devices, including …

When Nokia announced that they were going to give away free drive and walk navigation and other premium content for Ovi Maps, the N97 was left out from the list of devices that were supposed to get this. This left many people shocked, wondering why had Nokia done this.
Infact, Nokia almost got bad press for this. They quickly went into damage control mode and made it clear that the original N97 will be getting this free functionality, and soon. January 28 was the date promised, and Nokia has delivered ahead …

If you recall a few weeks ago Nokia released an Urbanista styled Widget, basically the widget combined with a GPS enabled handset and the Sports tracker application allows us to track and upload our movements, tagging places with images as we go along (Detail here).
A little while ago the Sports Tracker Application also received an update which now allows a user to upload video clips along with pictures taken during the journey to the Sports Tracker web site. Following suite, the Widget has also been updated with the ability to add videos along with …

After a long public Beta, Nokia Maps has finally graduated out of Beta and is available for download for all FP1 devices. This will also mean that future devices and firmwares will make come with Maps 2 preinstalled, a big plus as Maps 2 does a lot more than the maps application the phones currently ship with.
The Maps application now packs enormous worldwide street mapping, POI datasets, Pedestrian Navigation, new Satellite Images and Support for integrated Compass Orientation (read Nokia 6120)! All of this free, of course, the pay-as-you-go voice-guided …

Although this was kind of expected at some stage, Crave brings news that Nokia at Where 2.0, announced Maps on Ovi, a Web component designed to to complement its mobile mapping software, Nokia Maps 2.0.

As part of the Ovi brand of Internet services, which includes the Nokia Music Store and N-Gage gaming platform, Maps on Ovi will allow users to plan their trips on their desktop or laptop and then synchronize (automatically or manually) it with their smartphones. Conversely, if you’re already out on the road, you can record routes …

I have been playing with the 3rd Edition version of the hugely successful application Guardian, by Marco Bellino. What are my reactions? I am very pleased. There is just so much this small piece of software can do. As the name suggests, the software is basically meant to protect your phone from unauthorised usage, if it gets stolen or even otherwise. It comes in three different variants, a free basic version, a Gold and a Platinum version; naturally functionality keeps increasing with each higher version. For the purpose of this …

I’m not sure all of you will remember the widget that allowed us to keep track of the Urbanistas as they travelled the world. For those who do, I am sure you will agree with me it was pretty slick. Now here’s the good news, as part of Nokia’s ongoing Urbanista project, they have re-released the widget that the original Urbanista diarists used as they travelled about, only this time anyone including you and me can use it.
Basically, the widget, combined with a GPS enabled handset and the Sports tracker application …

For downloading the various country maps you need to install Nokia Map Loader, something quite improved since the first version but still only works if you download and install .net framework. It also happens to be windows only. Nokia Maps allows downloading maps over the air but is limited to the region you are in, it doesn’t allow you to download a particular country completely over the internet.
But now now you can get them across without having to install anything on your computer or theoritically if your phone has WiFi …

AAS had reported a few days back that Nokia Maps has hit beta 2.0. The new application came with a new Map loader version 1.3.5. You can download Nokia Maps beta 2.0 and the Map Loader here. I had expected some sort of data update for India with the new map loader but it didn’t happen immediately. Today I just found the the map data for India has been upped from the earlier 21 MB to 24.1 MB.

I don’t have the details of the data that has been updated and …

I few days back I had talked about my pursuit of better maps for India on my N95 in the post Mapping India.
Although I was more or less satisfied with MG Maps running Yahoo India Maps, there was one drawback in application which was preventing it to be a perfect mapping and navigation solution for the Indian user. As I had mentioned in the earlier post, the driving directions feature is still not available in India since MG Maps uses Google for all its searches by default including routes (Google …