Navigating the world with Nokia Maps

MANILA, Philippines - Impossible as it may seem, one can get lost even in a small country like Singapore. Such was the case when my friends and I came out from the basement of a Singapore mall to a backstreet that threw us off kilter.

Luckily, the guy in the group was brandishing a new Nokia N9 with Nokia Maps which he used to quickly point us to the right direction. Men, as it turns out, don’t mind asking for directions if it’s from a real-time map.

Nokia, which has sold over 84 million GPS-enabled devices worldwide, has one of the largest numbers of users of mobile location-based services that include digital maps. Nokia Maps are reportedly being used by more or less 27 million users today.

At last month’s Nokia World in London, map geeks who constantly update and improve Nokia Maps said they have so far mapped 196 countries but their work is far from done.

“There are at least two million changes in the world map each day,” said Sara Rossio, who is with Nokia’s Location and Commerce team. “We have massive amounts of data that we gather each day for Nokia Maps.”

Rossio said the current Nokia Maps feature 38 million road networks. To put that in perspective, she said it would be like the distance from the Excel convention center in London to the moon multiplied at least 50 times.

“That is how committed we are to building and collecting mapping data. We are now even looking at adding interior maps like those for malls and other places that many people navigate around,” she added.

The latest version of Nokia Maps not only offers satellite, terrain, and street maps but also supports pinch-to-zoom, weather report, Live View to show points of interests around the user’s current location, public transportation lines, turn-by-turn directions with voice-guided navigation for driving and even when walking, live traffic reports in some countries, and automatic link to location-aware social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. The street maps can be preloaded and used offline.

In addition, Nokia Maps early this year started offering 3D maps and 3D buildings in beta mode, and the company is expanding its third-party content partners to include as much location-based data as possible.

Navteq

If by any chance you spot a car with “Navteq” printed on its body and is fitted with some heavy-duty cameras precariously installed on top of the roof, it would be the car or “office” of the Nokia Maps team who literally takes its work on the road. Navteq is the Chicago-based digital map supplier that Nokia has acquired to build further on its mapping application.

It’s the Navteq cars that tediously drive around the world’s most famous roads and also the less traveled ones to keep Nokia Maps as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

Now, there might be a chance, too, that a robot will cross your path one day. It would be one of Navteq’s robots carrying some high-tech cameras and a laptop where it stores the new mapping data it collects.

The robot wheels itself freely and seems to know exactly how to get from point A to point B and back. Well, it has the map, doesn’t it? Have map, will travel. But for non-robots like us, it would be have phone, have map, will travel.