A few days ago I received an invitation from Nokia to watch their events.nokia.com site, supposedly they had a big announcement up their sleeve and that we all should be expecting it. We had our own guesses and these were the following.
1. Revamp of Ovi Store
2. Revamp of whole Ovi Services (files, share, email, etc)
3. New device with Maemo
4. First Nokia’s Symbian Foundation powered device
5. Your guess???
But we wrong, even when we were almost sure it was about the Ovi Store we were not even near! The big surprise was 10x bigger! Nokia announced that the premium-paid-services on Nokia maps was going to be, from January 21st of 2010, totally Free Forever!
At first it reminded me of Google’s Android announcemente a few months ago that said that their maps where going to be totally free including voice navigation, and though that Nokia was trying to catch up again with the competition. But then I realized that Nokia is a giant global company spanning around all the countries of this earth, against google which is just hatching from the egg. So this implies that the whole nokia user base, calculated thousand of MILLIONS are going to benefit from this announcement
But not only that, since Nokia is so big, they have a great influence on the whole mobile market which they also created. So this means that now voice navigation for free will be expected from every other manufacterer, changing the game related to the satellite navigation. From now and on you can expect Apple, Motorola, RIM, Google, HTC, Samsung, LG, Sony-Ericsson to provide free navigation to their devices. But, Nokia will still have the upper hand, because they are the only company in which maps can be saved in the device and be used without internet, making it usefull for people who don’t want to spend more money to download the maps on the go. And don’t forget who owns Navteq, the ones who get the mapping done!
This means that now satellite navigation will go ‘mainstream’ and you will now see people using it as every other basic function on every phone. This will make the GPS receiver a must have on any phone, just like cameras where set as a standard or every mid-low to high devices. Combine this with the new era of social networks and you will have the Social Location concept, which was first introduced by nokia on december 2008 with the announcement of the N97.
People will now share their physical location with their significant others and not because they couldnt before, there are lots of apps that could do that before, but because it will so ubiquitious that they will have the option on their head more present than before and also because it will become more easy every bit. Also events like concerts and other will be shared more easily.
I can see the future of social location, and it looks sweet! By now you can install the improved-new-free version of Ovi Maps from here, I have tested it and it is a big improvemente form the older Nokia Maps version. I was navigation earlier on my car and saw on the map that there was a mechanic shop on my left, so I turned around and saw something like this:
Which means that even smalls shops have been added to the points of interest! I tried food restaurants and mostly got big chains of food like mcdonalds, subway and peter piper pizza, so I hope they get more and smaller restaurants on the list. This is good for a small mexican town which isnt new york or more important places like mexico city. Is great to have Nokia give a good service and make it free to the masses.
For now, a big thumb for Nokia and hope they can keep improving and innovating. This is their chance to push their other Ovi services to their giant user base.
David Castro
ps. By the way I found this funny when a day before the big announcement nokia mexico was giving away free licences for voice navigation on their twitter account. I though I was smart since I caught 5 licences from them. The day after licences were useless, because Maps was free! LOL