The Atlantic: “Nokia Has Better Maps Than Apple and Maybe Even Google” (+Great story on NAVTEQ)
The Atlantic, globally ranked 1639 on Alexa Worldwide, 542 for Alexa US ran a story that clearly gives some recognition for Nokia’s maps.
It’s a very interesting read and even shows some of Nokia NAVTEQ’s world crawlers in their NAVTEQ cars, and what life is like living in a hotel whilst you map out a particular city.
There’s about 200,000 USD worth of NAVTEQ stuff on the car. Panoramas are captured for the ‘Bing’ street view, two GPS antennae, three laptops and a “LIDAR system that shoots 64 lasers 360 degrees around the car to create 3D images”. The atlantic goes on to explain how this is used at Nokia, such as automatic extraction of street names, working out height/length of bridges etc.
The difficulty is apparently not the process itself, but that once you start one end, by the time you get to the other, you’ll need to go back to the beginning because the world changes with time. Unlike Apple’s prehistoric maps, Nokia wants to give you as up to date maps as possible. When I moved to Preston, my accommodation this year was on a new estate. But Nokia Drive was able to find it. I had things delivered to the property but the drivers using TOMTOM could not find it at all (it was also TomTom that got the uni driver lost last term which ended up having to get Nokia Drive out to save the day)
We learn that Nokia has something called a ‘living map’ that kinda knows what you’re looking for. if you search for ‘Blue Bottle Coffee’ in San Fran, you’ll also get suggestions of other venues that sell Blue Bottle. If only the POI was as innovative and comprehensive.
In response to a passerby who said “We’re so close to the day when you can put on VR goggles and literally just walk through the world, anywhere in the world.” Nokia and NAVTEQ are apparently close to making a map of the world that is a copy of the world.
Someone who used to work at NAVTEQ left in the comments their disappointment of having to work with Apple Map data, as well as saying “ I can truly say that this article just touches the tip of the iceberg.”.
Source: theatlantic.com
Cheers M for the tip!
Category: Nokia
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As Elop said tip of the iceberg. IWant to see whats underneath a Treasure trove. May nokia morph gogles.
they havealready started that kind of app in phones… namely city lens..
Are you guys getting it now?
Location, location, location…
Yeah the “where” company. “Where” is the money ?? May be in going bankrupt.
Lol it always amuses me the amount of times Nokia owners mention how Nokia maps/drive has saved the day (everyone with a recent Nokia these days seems to have a story)… numerous times out in the country with no 2G signal (let alone 3G) signal, driving up and down back roads trying to find a place has been saved by me whipping out my Nokia N8/808 and going into smug mode ;D
And as you say it’s particularly amusing when I get find a location better than a dedicated GPS (tom tom usually) can.
Nokia Drive made me take a wrong turn this summer in Lapland, Finland.
It tried to show me a shortcut to the cabin I was going to, but the “road” it suggested to me was barely a bridle path and I had to turn back.
It was kind of amazing that it even know such a small road, though.
Yeah I’ve had that kind of thing where I’ve seen a road coming up on my maps and barely struggled to see what it was referring to… then realising we drove past what must have been it, and as you say, barely a road at all. Impressive to have that detailed maps indeed!
Navteq True LIDAR maps will run circles around the 3D maps Apple have currently. Can’t wait to have them in Lumia’s.
+1
We’ve been waiting years for it. I hope they come out with a sudden announcement that shocks the world. Ideally in time for the Lumia 920 launch
(v. unlikely) And it definitely shouldn’t be shared with the other WP OEMs!
I saw a NAVTEQ car the other day here in Cantabria, Spain. I hope they were adding the new highways that opened few months ago. Surprisingly one of them is already on bing maps but not on nokia maps, I thought bing maps were using navteq maps!
Nokia still need to ADVERTISE this!
I have lost count of how many times I show somebody (iAndroid) the offline maps and they always say “oh, I didn’t know it could do that . .”.
This, 6 years after having offline maps on my N95 !!!
Nobody knows!!!
As much as I really like Nokia’s Maps and Drive, it’s certainly not infallible for me – I’m on a new estate, my house was built around 2 years ago and the road it’s on over 3 years ago, but according to Nokia/Bing maps the section of road running past my house still does not exist (it stops a few houses before mine on the map).
This, despite the fact that Bing’s satellite images are new enough that the road and my house are there on the satellite photo, but not the actual map overlaying it (and Nokia’s satellite image shows I live in the middle of a field).
Google and OSM do however correctly recognise that my road and house exist on their maps.
Really fascinating stuff… Hope Nokia rolls out some of that 3D rendering stuff out quickly, now that they have an opening for getting some press and awareness on it.
As much as I loved Nokia Maps in the US, they just don’t exist here in Israel. There are complaint threads all over the Internet since the beginning of time asking Nokia for an ETA and there is never one forthcoming. I’m not even talking about street-view or City Lens type stuff, just a 2D map of all the intersections so I can get directions. In Israel, everyone is forced onto Google Maps because they are the only ones pro-active about mapping our country.
I don’t think Nokia can really claim that they have gloval maps until they at least have a simple 2D road map of every country on the planet.
But the maps just don’t work in Hong Kong… lots of POI simply aren’t found (ok with google), and lots of them are listed in completely the wrong locations…. also the wrong language is used (Mandarin Pinyin)… This needs to be made public so that Nokia will actually be motivated to fix it…