The Next Step in Social Location
The application has a web version as well if you want to browse through it on your desktop instead of a mobile device. With the web app, you can search for addresses and POIs, find places and save them into favorites, and organize them into collections. This way planning trips will be quite easy. Coupled with weather forecasts, there will not be any unforeseen disasters.
With this release, Nokia is also opening up an API called Ovi Maps Player API to independent developers. The API is supposed to be really easy to use and can be used to embed and integrate Ovi Maps on web pages, by using basic JavaScript. It’s hoped that social networking web sites will leverage this API and Nokia’s location capabilities to come up with some rich social applications that can then be synched with mobile devices. Mashup opportunities include infusing the application with content from newswire services. Releasing the API is probably a move by Nokia to better leverage the acquisition of Navteq, which they bought at a staggering $8 billion.
From a usability point of view, the Nokia application is always regarded as somewhat slower in terms of data delivery and triangulation, than say Google Maps. Hopefully, this new release will fix that.