Walk and Drive the Talk – The Ovi Maps Acid Test

There has been a lot of extremely positive buzz around Ovi Maps and it’s free drive and walk navigation. I have however only used it mainly for walk navigation when walking around different cities. I’ve been asking myself how it would be to travel REALLY long distances – say, through Europe – and rely only [...]

There has been a lot of extremely positive buzz around Ovi Maps and it’s free drive and walk navigation. I have however only used it mainly for walk navigation when walking around different cities. I’ve been asking myself how it would be to travel REALLY long distances – say, through Europe – and rely only on your Nokia and Ovi Maps. So what better way is there to become a true believer than walk (actually in this case drive) the talk and go on a serious road trip as Richa & Justus once did.

Preparations

Getting ready for the experiment meant leaving printouts of route descriptions and paper maps home. I decided to pre-load the whole map of Europe onto the memory card of my Nokia N97 mini to make navigation work in an offline mode and save on roaming costs. One can of course use Ovi Maps without the maps installed onto the device memory, but this requires a data connection that in my opinion is pricey when travelling abroad. Usually Nokia devices with Ovi Maps come with maps of certain regions pre-installed but you can update and add more regions onto the memory-card; you can do this with the help of Nokia Ovi Suite. The only thing to keep in mind when doing the pre-loading is to have enough space available on the hard-drive of your computer. What happens is that the map data is first downloaded onto your and then transferred to your Nokia over the USB cable. I also recommend doing this over a fast internet connection since for example the download size for the German and Swiss maps is almost 400 MB.

Day 1

I tried navigating offline without a SIM card in the phone – doing some “Deutschetechnonachtkruzin” (ed.note: I don’t know what that means either) as my friend Matt called it. Arriving late to Travemünde with the ferry from Finland meant driving the first part of the trip during night time. Driving during the night has its charm – I at least reached a Zen like state when it’s only me, the car and “das autobahn” combined with cans of Red Bull and some excellent German techno music. The first thing I noticed was how bright the screen of my Nokia really was. Switching the map into night mode changed the color scheme of Ovi Maps into much darker, making it look way cooler and at the same time reducing the brightness of the screen so it did not disturb me while driving. Getting a GPS fix took a bit longer than normal since Ovi Maps had to locate me without A-GPS. Once getting the fix however I was on the map the whole 4 hours of my first part of the trip. Navigation worked rock solid without a data connection and I was able to find my first stop north of Frankfurt, Germany without any problems.

Day 2

The second part of my trip was all about trying to drain out the battery on Nokia during the 7 hour drive and multitasking during the breaks – not while driving (safety first!) There are few places on Earth where you can (legally) drive your car over 170 km/h on a public road and see a S-Series Mercedes-Benz in your rear view mirror approaching like a missile, flashing with the front lights indicating it’s time for you to step aside. In these instances, as always while driving, it is better to just concentrate on the driving yourself. And having turn-by-turn voice guidance allows you to do just that. Multitasking is one of the great things that has existed for as long as I can remember on Nokia smart phones. This means that you can have multiple apps on at the same time. It’s excellent to notice that the driving instructions can be heard even if you are in a call or listening to music or an audio book. This comes of course with a cost – multitasking consumes more battery than having just a single app on. After 5 hours of driving through Germany when arriving to Basel, Switzerland the battery was drained out. Luckily I had my car charger with me allowing me continue my way to the final destination in Geneva, Switzerland.

So now I can say that I am a believer. If you are about to do the same, just remember to pre-load the maps before going on the trip to avoid unnecessary data roaming costs, and get yourself a car charger to ensure that the beat goes on during your whole trip. Bon Voyage!

Jan

To learn more about Ovi Maps visit http://maps.nokia.com

P.S. Click on the picture to see an enlarged view of my route!

Source : http://blog.ovi.com/2010/05/06/walk-and-drive-the-...