Well, it wasn’t an Ovi Store announcement.
Nokia’s big announcement this morning was an all-new version of Ovi maps - available now for 10 devices including N97 mini, X6, E72 and 5800 - which has been re-written to be the ‘best personal navigation device in the world’. All maps, voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation (driving and walking) and ‘premium’ content from Lonely Planet, Michelin plus weather, live-traffic and events are now free. It’s also got lane-assist (as shown above) and voice-to-text for announcing road names.
The app now works completely offline (if you want) and mapping data has been re-worked to a ‘vector’ format reducing map-size by around 10 times… you can have maps of the entire world for 6GB if you’d like. The app also adds location sharing to Facebook (although conspicuously no other social networks at the moment.
More pictures of the event and app are available in our Flickr set.
Nokia says this will change the face of personal navigation and capitalises on their purchase of Navtec. Our comment and opinion’s coming… As ever our friends at All About Symbian have the story in detail.
This is Nokia’s launch video: