Ovi Maps 3.06 Beta - Not bad at all!

Recently I had an opportunity to try out the new Ovi Maps beta version (3.06 - available from Nokia Beta Labs) quite extensively in my travels. Well, maybe "opportunity" isn't the right word here. I was more like forced to use it, since for some reason the cigarette lighter plug did not function in the rental car I had and therefore I could not use my trusty TomTom which, as usual for TomTom devices in general, cannot run on the battery longer than the time it takes to boot up.

Being “forced” to use the Ovi Maps on  a Nokia E7 running Symbian ^3 turned out to be not that bad at all, despite the minor inconvenience of not having a car mobile holder for the device. One of the first things I noticed was… that it’s really idiotic, hazardous and unbelievably annoying to have your sat nav  running loose all over the car while trying to figure out where on earth I am and where I should go! OK, let me rephrase that. One of the first positive things I noticed was that I was not able to launch Ovi Maps running on battery only, but I was able to even enter the destination address too. Without recharging it in between! Having used TomTom for years, I was rather impressed by this achievement.

By this time I was logically assuming it will run out of juice any moment. I was just hoping it would survive long enough to get past the tricky bits. The bits where one actually has to turn. Surprisingly, it stayed alive long enough for that. But what was truly shocking, was the fact that it still kept going. For almost 3 hours, in fact! Now, having a mobile device which is able to stay on for almost 3 hours doesn’t sound that spectacular, I agree. However, having a large 4” screen on during all that time, receiving GPS signals and calculating new routes about 18 times per minute, since the driver of the car keeps making wrong turns because he can neither see the screen, after the last bend which sent it flying somewhere in the general vicinity of the back seat, nor hear it because the music is too good to lower the volume. All this while doing the normal function of a mobile phone, which in this case, mainly involved trying to stay alive and not to break into many tiny pieces.

What about the navigation itself? On those very brief moments when I could actually see the screen, usually after right turns when the device flew passed my eyes, I found it very clear and informative. The routing was great too. Not only did it find the optimal route, but it was quite fast too. It was certainly faster than my TomTom in recalculating a new route after some unexpected route choices on part of the driver.

While the map itself was less detailed than the one in TomTom, at least in Italy, it was actually a good thing. TomTom for some reason is convinced that I’m driving a tractor and picks fitting roads for it from its very detailed maps. Now Ovi Maps is missing these prehistoric hunting paths, which is a shame if you happen to be historian who is obsessed about some obscure nearsighted hunter from about 3649 years ago who missed a stop sign and was over run by a rabbit, but is a great thing for anyone who prefers to avoid the shortcut which goes trough a swamp.

This beta version of Ovi Map had great new thing I noticed. I was able to download map over the air, without the need to use a computer. This is a truly convenient feature. But it would be even better if it would actually store the maps too! In my case it stored the maps only after I hooked the Nokia E7 to the computer and downloaded the maps using Ovi Suite. I might be picky here, but I think that kind of defeats the purpose. Then again, it is a beta, so probably they will fix it before the final release. Another annoyance I noticed was that if when I had the device offline to avoid expensive roaming charges, it kept complaining about not having internet connection. Well, duh! There was a point why I downloaded the amps before hand.

To sum up, I found this version of Ovi Maps to be surprisingly good. Not only did the navigation work great, but it had all these extra services which made it easy to find out what was going on near by, like shows and movies. Furthermore, I really think the Nokia engineers have done an excellent job with the battery life. However, a word of warning: get a car mobile holder if you are planning to use Ovi Maps, lest you want to be repeatedly hit by a Nokia mobile in the head. The new Symbian ^3 devices from Nokia can take it, since they are surprisingly sturdy, but a human head displays some weaknesses on this department.