Yesterday Nokia sent out a press release covering its Nokia Maps product, revealing some plans for the future of this service. The announcement stems from Where 2.0, a conference taking place in San Jose, California, that Nokia attended last year, as well. The conference focuses on location-based services and applications using location to help consumers.
For starters, Nokia officially announced its new Ovi Maps Player API beta program, which allows application developers and web site designers to use Ovi Maps information in their products. This will open things up quite a bit, and I’m pretty interested in seeing some of the creative uses that are made possible. This also competes directly with Google Maps’ similar API, so it pits Nokia head-to-head with the undisputed leader of mobile mapping.
The press release also highlighted some of the new features that have already been in place in the Nokia (or rather, now, Ovi) Maps v3 beta, from the Nokia Beta Labs. These updates were announced and made available in December at Nokia World, and include 3D buildings, automatic color changes (night/day mode), and synchronization with your online Ovi account for landmarks and routing.
The team is also announcing Apps on Maps, which makes it possible for 3rd party developers to tie their applications into Ovi Maps on your phone. I’m *really* excited about this, because it opens up a host of opportunities. Imagine, when you drive by a post office, your phone knows that you have a Netflix movie to return (because it’s connected with your Netflix account), and buzzes to remind you to return it. What other uses for this can you think of?
The hidden suggestion, though, is that Apps on Maps could work to offload some of the fun ideas that the Maps team has, and could allow them to refocus on the application itself – things like searching, overall stability, speed, etc really need some attention.
