Now that Nokia has made access to its "Ovi Maps" facility entirely free, all you need is a relatively recent Nokia mobile phone that supports GPS or A-GPS. So we decided to give it a day in Bangalore with a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic (using firmware v40). Read on for the strong points we saw, where it is weak, and how/where to download this software for your own mobile phone. See also what are the implications for Nokia, and how the functionality of a competing map software like Google Maps stacks up.

The first requirement for this functionality is of course a mobile that runs Nokia’s Symbian operating system. Most supported phones are likely to be running an older version of "Maps" that requires you to pay for subscription so you need to remove that and install the latest version (v3.03) using the links given on the second page of this article.

At first glance, it is all awesome from the beginning to the end. You can download maps incrementally as and when required, and see where you are positioned on a map. You can search for locations using landmarks/street name/locality and so on. Once you have either found the location on the map, or are at a favoured location, it can be saved as a “Favorite” which can be used later in many ways. You can drive or walk to a destination you choose. Maps can be seen in different view modes – maps, satellite, terrain, 3D, landmarks and night mode. You can zoom in or zoom out as per your requirements. Traffic information can be received live. Some other value additions here include weather information for today and the next 4 days, information downloads from Lonely Planet, syncing your maps data with a Nokia Ovi Maps account online, sharing locations and getting data about your current journey (average speed, distance, latitude and longitude of destination, etc).

Now to jump right into the experience we got while driving around Bangalore. To put it in the most succinct words, the navigation happened as smoothly as expected. The on-screen map keeps tracking your progress and showing landmarks around your current location. You can use voice guidance to keep the phone in your pocket and drive as per instructions given. It did well, giving left-right directions and how far to walk/drive before taking a turn. Just to see how good route re-calculation is, we dis-regarded the guidance and missed some turns, and the phone took barely 15 seconds to re-calculate a fresh route and direct us accordingly. At any point, you can look up the distance traveled, time taken and average speed of movement. Maps for India included the position of most cities/towns and all the national/state highways. But once you decide to zoom into more detail and get deeper into the map, only the larger cities have complete landmarks and road maps – the smaller towns simply make do with being a dot on the map.

But it does fail at some things. Firstly, the Location service is entirely useless indoors and getting a lock on our position was not possible, atleast while using a phone with A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning System which uses cell towers instead of satellites). Alright, so we accept that and step out into the open, but even then getting a lock to know your position on the map takes a long time. Sometimes it is ready for navigation within a minute, at other times it takes 20 minutes, which can be really annoying if you are only traveling a short distance anyway. Lastly, the route guidance gave us many humorous moments when it took us into tiny lanes with a house at the dead-end, and then advised taking a right to reach the main road… which would make us uninvited guests into homes whose back doors don't quite open out onto the main road at the other end! But this and the route instructions that conflicted with one-way roads can be forgiven, considering that even though Nokia Maps offers detailed maps, Bangalore’s city roads are not the best planned. Another impact of using GPS on the Nokia 5800 phone, was that its fully charged battery folded up in two hours. If your journey will take longer than that, or you’re planning a cross-country tour, this means you should carry a phone charger in your car at all times, lest you be stranded in the midst of an unfamiliar place once the battery dies.

*go to the next page to get information on how to pre-load maps of your country onto your phone.