New Ovi Maps: Faster. Better. Personal.

4 months ago, on Jan 21, the previous release of Ovi Maps with Free worldwide Walk & Drive navigation was made available for you to download. And your response has been amazing. More than 10.000.000 downloads in 3 months and overwhelmingly positive feedback showed us that we did the ...

4 months ago, on Jan 21, the previous release of Ovi Maps with Free worldwide Walk & Drive navigation was made available for you to download. And your response has been amazing. More than 10.000.000 downloads in 3 months and overwhelmingly positive feedback showed us that we did the right thing.

Today I would like to share what we have learned from you and how the new, just released Ovi Maps was designed to make the experience better in core areas of usage: faster, better and more personal.

Faster

Every day, over 80% of you that are using Ovi Maps in online mode find your position on the map. Now we made it faster and more accurate: our engineers optimized the process of acquiring the location and added Wi-Fi positioning in the mix. Now you can locate yourself faster and more precisely, no matter if you are in a mall, on the street surrounded by skyscrapers or driving on an open highway. Wi-Fi positioning is a work in progress and it will get better and better as more people use it.

The second major change done under the hood was related to graphics performance when zooming in and out of maps, panning and tilting. All these functionalities are now faster, and in the new N8, they are blazing fast. Check out this video to see it in action in an early build:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Better

Every day, more than 50% of you using Ovi Maps in online mode search for places and addresses. And during these months we worked hard to make sure that we increase the number of places that can be found. And we are happy to tell you that today we have more points of interest that you can find across the globe, consolidated from Navteq, Lonely Planet, Michelin, local Yellow pages companies like Telegate in Germany, Cityvox in France, Yell in Spain and Yellow Pages in Turkey.

This last bit you are going to love. Starting today, Qype places are available in Ovi Maps. Qype is Europe’s leading portal of user generated recommendations and review and now you can discover and rate Qype places by searching in Ovi Maps. Rest assured, this is just the beginning. We are expanding the coverage of places every week so you can always find what are you looking for. Just remember to search for places in online mode to take advantage of all the new additions.

More personal

Next, we looked at navigation. Over 40% of you use Drive navigation every day in online mode. Together, we drive more than 14 times around the world every day with Ovi Maps. We know that many of you are taking advantage of the unique offline mode navigation capabilities of Ovi Maps so the actual figure is far more greater.

With Own Voice, you can now make Drive navigation your own. Record your personal voice commands or ask a friend, your kids or your better half. And if you want, you can share it with the world. Your voice can help millions of people find their way. Isn’t this cool? Your voice on millions and millions of Nokia devices.

You can also discover and use what others have created. Since launching 2 weeks ago, over 4000 voice packs were shared by you with the world via Own Voice.

Navigation has never been this personal or fun for that matter. Just head to ovi.com/ownvoice to get started and go to nokia.com/maps to get the new Ovi Maps release.

Finally, if you plan on upgrading your device, we have great news for you. Starting 2 weeks ago, N97, N97 mini, 6710 Navigator and X6 ship with the new Ovi Maps, a car holder and a car charger in box. 5800 XpressMusic, 5230, E52 and E72 will ship with the new Ovi Maps and a car holder. So you are ready to go when you leave the shop.

-Pino

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/05/20/new-ovi-maps-faster...