5 Things To Love About Nokia’s New Maps

Nokia's rebranded mapping service will soon arrive on iPhones and and Android devices, under the moniker of Here. For Android users this isn't a huge deal, but for iPhone owners living in the age of iOS 6, it could change a lot. Nokia's maps, on other platforms, have been fantastic.

The apps aren't quite available yet, but the web-based version of Here is functional on mobile browsers, offering a glimpse of what we can expect. What's so great about it? Quite a bit, actually.

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Cached Maps: Here will allow you to select a zone and zoom level for any given locale, and then the app will download all the data it needs so that you can access the maps offline. I chose lower mahattan at the setting which just starts to detail streets, and it cached a ~35 megabyte map for me. This is a feature I can see myself using on a regular basis.

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Smart Traffic Routing: Unfortunately, the web version of Here does not have turn-by-turn, but its static driving directions do make up for that some. You see, there happens to be an option to select the time of day you'll be driving, and it will determine the most efficient route from point A to point B based on the normalized traffic data it has collected in the past for any given time of day.

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Public Transit

: Yes, public transit is a prominent part of Here. But more than just giving you subway directions when you ask for them, it displays the name of each metro station on the map and gives you the option of overlaying train maps on top of the standard map (see top image).

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Collections: Going on a trip and want to bookmark all the places you've researched on a map? Wandering around randomly one day and want to remember that shop you stepped into? Collections is a quick and easy way to plot points on a map. It's like a more functional Google Custom Map.

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Points of Interest: If you search for a business, restaurant, or anything else using Here, it will automatically generate a list of nearby spots that you might also be interested in. Handy if the place you're trying to travel to is closed, or fully booked.

Of course, this is still just a web app, so it's a little lacking when it comes to beauty and polish. But if Here can combine the functionality of the web app with the perks of a natively coded app, it could be really awesome. We'll find out in a few weeks.

Nokia's Apple attack: A better Maps app for iPhone

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” -- Henry Miller.

Nokia is battling back at Apple's [AAPL] weakest point, launching a superior location and mapping app for iOS, reaching a browser map deal with Google competitor Mozilla and promising reference systems for Android developers as it fights for a place in the smartphone biz.

Nokia is HERE for iPhone

Nokia is launching its maps application for iOS under the HERE brand. The app is based on HTML5 and boasts some cool offline capabilities you just won’t find on Apple Maps: voice-guided walk navigation, and public transport directions. 

Announcing the app, Nokia’s head of user experience design, Peter Skillman,said the release was partially at least: “On the chance that there might be a few iPhone users that want a different map.”

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said the move would let his firm: "...extend our 20 years of location expertise to new devices and operating systems that reach beyond Nokia. As a result, we believe that more people benefit from and contribute to our leading mapping and location service."

The company has seen its marketshare slide in recent years, battered by the twin smartphone giants of Apple and Google.

Taking steps to proliferate its brand across other platforms may help it retain a connection with users, perhaps drawing them back to its products on strength of positive user experiences.

It doesn’t hurt that Nokia’s mapping services are widely seen as being better than Google’s offering or Apple’s attempt.

Digging the earthmine

One feature Nokia doesn’t yet have is Flyover -- the clever 3D city simulation Apple users enjoy on iOS 6. In order to overtake its Californian rival, Nokia will acquire earthmine, whose reality capture and processing technologies will become integral parts of HERE's 3D map making capabilities. 

The company also took a bite at augmented reality with the release of Livesight, which is the tech behind Nokia City Lens as developed for the Nokia Lumia. “LiveSight provides the most precise and intuitive augmented reality experience and uses a phone's camera viewfinder to make discovering the world as easy as lifting up a phone,” the company said.

The company will next year introduce reference tools third party developers can use to pop Nokia Maps inside of Google’s mobile OS.

CCS Insight analyst, Martin Garner, told the Financial Times: “Nokia is now in head-on competition with Google across the major smartphone platforms. This is a logical extension of its strategy to make Maps a horizontal technology, similar to Google’s approach with search.”

Nokia’s move to take on Apple with an iOS app is pretty shrewd. The company recognizes Apple’s brand loyalty is teetering as consumers grow tired of the constant litigation and confused by the regularity with which the iconic company now attracts bad press. 

iPhone losing luster?

A recent poll from Harris Interactive suggested young consumers and early adopters in the UK are now more willing than before to switch from iPhone to other brands. “25 per cent of current iPhone users are anticipating the release of other smartphones more.”

Nokia also knows that should Apple refuses to carry its mapping app on the App Store, then it should benefit from the inevitable outburst of criticism of such a step.

The company has had to go through painful internal reorganization to reach this point, following CEO Stephen Elop’s warning last year that: “The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.”

“This is Nokia finally realizing a vision they’ve been working on for a long time,” Gartner analyst, Van Baker, told Businessweek. “They’ve probably got the best maps on the market, and they’re a lot further down the road” in terms of delivering user-specific relevant information.

The move to offer up maps for competing platforms means the company is now playing to its strengths. 

It’s open to question whether it will succeed in regaining momentum in the smartphone sector, but it’s pretty certain its mapping app will be firmly put through its paces by iPhone users, pending major improvements in Apple Maps. 

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Nokia Unveils a Map Service that Lives in the Cloud

With a new mapping service, called Here, Nokia hopes to get smartphone users hooked on its mapping technology.

Nokia introduced a new cloud-optimized version of its mapping technology on Tuesday. The company hopes the Web service and associated apps, rebranded as Here, will be a hit across different devices and software platforms—including on the iPhone and Android phones.The company’s CEO, Stephen Elop, introduced Here at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday morning. Here is available through a Web browser and as an iPhone app. It includes directions, 3-D city views, the ability to create and save a collection of destinations, and live traffic data. The same technology is already built into Windows Phone 8, the software that powers Nokia’s smartphones.

The announcement comes about a month after Apple launched its own mapping app to replace Google Maps as the default navigation tool on its devices. Apple’s app was widely criticized for being buggy and incomplete (see “Is Apple Losing Its Way?”), and the controversy highlighted the importance of quality mapping technology to mobile users.

Here includes technology from Nokia-owned Navteq, as well as Earthmine, a 3-D imaging company that Nokia announced it is acquiring. Elop said Nokia hopes developers will create new location-enabled services on top of Here.

Nokia already provides mapping technology to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Yahoo Maps, and others. But the success of Here could be crucial if Nokia is to regain favor in the smartphone market, where Apple’s iPhone and smartphones running Android dominate.

Michael Halbherr, executive vice president of Nokia’s location and commerce business and the head of Here, said that Here offloads many tasks to the cloud so that it doesn’t require much bandwidth to load and its maps can be downloaded to a smartphone without taking up much storage space.

Peter Skillman, head of design for location and commerce at Nokia, demonstrated Here on the Web, zooming in from a large 3-D map of the world to a vivid 3-D map of San Francisco and down to the city’s streets. Searching for Greek restaurants yielded a number of results and little blue arrows peppering the map; you can pick any of the results and drop them into personal “collections” of destinations you plan to visit (these collections can be viewed with any device on which you’re using Here).

Skillman also showed off the iPhone version of Here, which will be available as a free app in the next several weeks and will include features like turn-by-turn driving directions and voice-guided walking directions.

Nokia is rolling it out “on the off chance that there may be some iPhone users that want a different map,” he said, taking a shot at rival Apple over its mapping application. The company says it will make a Here software tool kit for Android smartphone makers available during the first quarter of next year.

Additionally, Nokia is partnering with Mozilla to make Here available on the browser maker’s forthcoming smartphone operating software, Firefox OS.

Nokia to Launch Laptop Range

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has revealed it is considering launching a range of business laptops.

According to Reuters, Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo confirmed the move during an interview on Finnish TV.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity," Kallasvuo said in answer to whether the phone manufacturer would diversify into the laptop market.

"We don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a mobile phone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging. Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first internet experience on the phone.