Perspectives

Inspired by Pradeep B V’s comment on my earlier post, I went on to check if Nokia has any (updated) Maps for my Nokia Phone (N73). My phone does not have GPS like the Nokia Navigator, but nevertheless, Maps on mobile (with GPRS for Search) can still come in very handy. Also, my phone came pre packaged with a dumb local application (with maps), but it only used to show the outline of India. Now, I have seen that many times in my sixth class Geography and that level of map is not useful for any god damn thing, let alone Local Search.

So, I started from here , downloaded and installed the “Nokia Maps” application over to my phone and then downloaded and installed a windows only (Infact, you won’t even find the download link on firefox on windows. Visit the link on IE) application over to my PC. And then, after a few glitches, I downloaded the India data pack.

The map data is from Navteq. And we all already know Navteq does not have the best data set for India. For instance, the data pack for China was about 190 MB whereas the India one was 21MB. (India is about a third in size compared to China).

I was checking in and around Bangalore and they have all the major roads named and searchable. But more importantly, because you can download the data pack into your mobile, you don’t need a network connection to search or view the Map. That is cool, because GPRS (or EDGE, 2.5 G) is real slow for Maps. Also, there is no connectivity in places where you generally tend to get lost.

Now, the technology is also different when you compare this with Google Maps Mobile or Yahoo! Go. Nokia Maps is a vector map application. What that means is, the maps are rendered by an engine that understands shapes rather than showing images that have maps pre-rendered (aka raster maps ).

So, the application is smaller, renders what needs to be rendered and ignores layers and shapes when it needs to, It is probably a bit slower because of all the bits it needs to flip/flop before rendering the shape. I may be wrong here, that is just my guess.

I don’t have GPS on my phone. Earlier, I tried to buy a bluetooth GPS receiver that I can hook up with my phone. But the pieces that I tried never worked with my phone and I gave up. So, I couldn’t check if GPS worked well with the application and if the map is, infact, accurate.

Anyway, If you have a Nokia big smart phone, go download the maps. It will come in handy.

Just learnt that MGMaps has added Yahoo India maps support. What that means is now, using mgmaps and selecting Yahoo India maps as the map provider, you have lesser ways of getting lost in India. The default search is still from Google though. I actually didnt know about mgmaps until the Google controversy. But the app is one helluva sweet little thing. Works like a charm.

I was thrilled for a different reason though. I wanted to see how our maps look on a mobile. Sort of a first look for me as well. Aah, looks sweet. I searched all over the place and got my archaic digi cam to take a pic of my phone with our maps (these days, I click only with my phone).

What do you think? Is a mobile map app something that Indians want ?

I am not sure when this got out, but remember Google included tiles for India a little while ago? And do you know they have a downloadable mobile app for maps? Now, they have put them both together. And it is rocking!

You still cant search for anything within India. You would still have to head over to Yahoo maps for that! But what strikes me is the clarity of the map when viewed on my Nokia N73. I was to go to a school for an admission for my brother. I just knew it was somewhere in Indiranagar. The “city local on telephone” guys like 080-22222222 and 080-2777777 were both unreachable at that point.
I remembered G had many interesting points of interests on their maps. I just gave it a shot and I was able to find the school in 2 mins!

Again, Rock on google. What are you enabling search ?