Demo of the N97 compass

This video demos the widgets and the N97’s compass.(Note to self, get screen wipes for the N97)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbIIn5l7TY0]

The point of the compass is to orientate your map in the direction which your facing. From the video, you can see it’s very sensitive thus a very promising addition to Nokia Maps.

No more looking at your maps in confusion:

“Right, I’m on this street, I’m moving this way, the map is moving that way so this must be the way! Am I?”

With compass, the simple Maps on it’s own will be great enough to get around – but with the additional guides and navigation, it’ll be an impossibility to ever get lost!

Everything is orientated to how you are moving.

You can imagine that it’s like overlaying labels of place names over your current location.  Now that’ll be interesting. Maybe use the camera as a viewfinder to literally do that?  Use the GPS to know where you are, the compass to where you’re facing and then from the viewfinder (and additional software) somehow annotate live on screen what street you’re on, what certain landmarks are. Like a live street view. (This is not an original concept, it’s been thought of before in several contexts)

[Image from N97 Manual: View it in .pdf here]

According the the N97 Manual, to calibrate the compass, you must pretend that your N97 is a lightsaber.

Tags: Compass, Lightsaber, Location, Manual, Maps, N97, N97 Manual, Navigation, Nokia, Nokia N97, Star Wars

Category: 5th Edition, Nokia, Nseries