AppleInsider Staff
Nokia on Tuesday made good on a promise to bring its new "Here" mapping service to iOS as it launched a free app complete with offline caching and voice-guided walking directions.
Nokia's new "Here" mapping app offers walking and public transit directions.
First spotted by The Next Web, "Here" comes exactly one week after Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that the app would be available for iPhones, iPads and iPods sometime in the coming weeks.
According to Nokia, the HTML5-based mapping solution includes offline capabilities and, unlike Apple's own Maps app, voice-guided walking navigation and public transportation directions.
"Maps are hard to get right - but location is revolutionizing how we use technology to engage with the real world," said Nokia's Executive Vice President of Location & Commerce Michael Halbherr, who is responsible for Here. "That's why we have been investing and will continue to invest in building the world's most powerful location offering, one that is unlike anything in the market today."
The Finnish company also noted that future updates will come with 3D capabilities akin to Apple and Google's solutions, which will come from technology acquired by earthmine. Nokia is rolling out the mapping service on its Microsoft Windows Phone handsets as well as versions for Google's Android and Mozilla's Firefox OS.
Nokia's app is one of the first major no-cost mapping submissions to rival Apple's Maps app, which caused a flap with consumers and the media when it was released as part of iOS 6 in September. With Maps, Apple chose to move away from its longstanding partnership with Google Maps to a proprietary solution built completely in house. Upon launch, however, the program was fraught with problems like rendering issues and incorrect location data.
The internet search giant is said to be planning its own standalone iOS app that may see release soon as rumors claim the company is distributing near final versions of the software to outside testers. One of the major gripes with Apple's solution is the lack of Google's Street View option, however that feature was brought back to mobile Safari with the Google Maps web app in October with limited functionality.
Nokia's Here is available now for iOS as a free download from the App Store.
Christine McKee
Stephen Silver
Charles Martin
Amber Neely
57 Comments
got it
Great app! Searched for 'PrintHouse' in London and the app found 'Penthouse' night club. Didn't realise it could read one's mind! :D
From a user point of view, having several Maps apps is a loss of time and also increases the risk of cluttering. The way Apple should have fight against Google Maps is exactly the way they dropped PowerPC: They only released Intel support when it was 100% ready and it matched all the 100% of functionality of the PowerPC versions. For maps, they should have followed the same approach: develop Apple Maps in secret, until it matches -or surpasses- the 100% of Google Maps functionality, and in the mean time continue supporting Google Maps as the official maps app for iOS. Then, one morning you announce Apple Maps, and the same afternoon the app is ready for download. End of story. That's the way Apple always played these games, and that's how they should have done it now.
Instead, they argued you had lots of maps apps as alternatives to Apple Maps and Google Maps. That's bad, you don't need cluttering alternatives, you want Google Maps, and -when it's ready-, Apple Maps. Just keep it simple.
Now let's wait until we also get Sony Maps, McDonalds Maps, and Barbie Maps.
I encourage everyone to download and try out this software. It's a great reminder of the crap people have to put up with on other platforms. No retina graphics. It's slow. Pinch to zoom is wonky. Search results are not centered on the map, so when you try to zoom in the search result immediately scrolls off screen. Search results are worse than Apple Maps. Most of the search problems with Apple Maps in my area were resolved within the first two weeks of release. These same problems are still present in Nokia's maps.
"Maps are hard to get right"
And they got them wrong. Very slow, shitty typography, zooming isn't continuous, so whenever you stop pinching it'll jump to the nearest accepted zoom level (in practice not even close to what you wanted). Several roads missing (including half my entire neighbourhood), some in the wrong place, and a complete lack of POIs that makes Apple Maps (which is great on roads but poor on POIs in my city) look like a gold standard. Transit directions were also missing from my city.