Sam Oliver
Finnish telecommunications company Nokia on Wednesday announced that it would bring its Here mapping service — Â which has not appeared in native form on Apple devices in nearly a year — Â back to iOS with a new standalone app in early 2015.
"Following the positive reviews of HERE for Android, a lot of people have expressed their interest in an iOS version of our app," the company wrote in a blog post. "We really appreciate this interest and demand. Our iOS app development team is working hard on this and we plan to officially launch HERE for iOS in early 2015."
Nokia revealed its plans for a new assault on Apple and Google Maps in September of this year, months after its previous attempt was pulled from the App Store over iOS 7 compatibility problems.
"I'm convinced people are looking for alternatives," Nokia executive Sean Fernback said at the time. "Google Maps is a good solution for many, their maps work very well, but it has looked the same and done the same for a long time."
Nokia's newest effort includes voice-guided navigation, the ability to download maps for offline use, and public transit information. Google has long offered those features, while Apple has yet to give users control of tile caching and does not include public transportation data.
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16 Comments
"Google Maps is a good solution for many, their maps work very well, but it has looked the same and done the same for a long time." Um, no, and that's the problem with Google Maps: the interface keeps changing with such frequent updates, it's a real pain having to keep figuring out how it works.
I used Nokia's HERE maps just once and found it abysmal. Deleted it and never looked back.
HA!
"Google Maps is a good solution for many, their maps work very well, but it has looked the same and done the same for a long time."
Um, no, and that's the problem with Google Maps: the interface keeps changing with such frequent updates, it's a real pain having to keep figuring out how it works.
You said it. Things like where's my simply printable step by step directions on the Mac browser version? Screw all this whiz-bang UI crap where next steps pop up or whatever they're doing instead...
...nearly unusable for my current purposes...
Pretty sure we can afford to wait on this one.