When Nokia Maps 2.0 was announced earlier this year, one of the cool new features announced was traffic updates, a service I would gladly pay for, specially living near such a large city. While not available yet, looking through the menus of Nokia Maps, it’s easy to see that the traffic information will not merely be for show – the new v2.0 of the application will be able to automatically route drivers around traffic obstacles without being prompted, saving time in the process.
Nokia announced today that they will be hooking up with ARC Transistance in Europe for near real-time traffic information as a premium service. ARC provides traffic information to many of the leading navigation players and cover 16 European countries.
Sounds cool, but the seemingly age-old question is: What about the U.S.? We drive arguable more than most European cities, especially given that precious few American cities have a decent mass transit system, and here in Texas we have wide open spaces still to drive over. I seem to recall that Nokia was working with the University of California at Berkeley on something for the U.S., I wonder how that experiment worked?
No word on pricing for our European readers, but stay tuned.
