When Nokia purchased Gate5 several years ago, and then Navteq and Plazes more recently, we knew the company was betting big on location-based services. Since then, Nokia Maps has come out, all the way up to the beta of V3.0, with Ovi Synchronization and a host of other cool updates. We’ve seen a few other ventures, such as FriendView and whatnot, but that’s about it. However, that could all change soon.
According to Pocket Gamer, recently at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, Nokia’s Mark Ollila showed off some screenshots of a new racing game, built around Nokia Maps, for N-Gage. The game, apparently temporarily called ‘Nokia Maps Racing’, seems to allow you to create custom maps based on where you’re currently located, and you can share those maps with friends or even possibly leave them there, so that someone else could ‘stumble’ on your map and play it themselves.
It definitely sounds like a cool idea, and one of those innovative-type things that N-Gage really needs to set it apart from its competition. Of course, they’ll still need to fix that pesky licensing issue before I’ll use N-Gage again. What do you think? Does this sound cool?
