Nokia has struck back at Google’s announcement of off-line Google Maps navigation, which will in fact only allow users to download a 10 mile radius of Google Maps data for off-line turn by turn GPS navigation in only 29 countries.
Google notes that this will allow international travellers to save on data costs by downloading cities ahead of time.
Nokia insisted today however that a small 10 mile area was just not enough. By way of comparison, Nokia allows customers to download street-level maps for entire countries.
"Offering offline maps is not only about giving the option to cache some data offline for later use, it’s a complete experience," the company said in a blog post Thursday. "An offline experience is not only about street maps, it’s also about offline available points of interest (POIs) to enable offline search, it’s about navigation voices available on-device and offline rerouting."
"So now you have all these shiny maps stored offline and you are ready to go. What will you do with them?" Nokia asks. "Most probably you are going to put your smartphone in your car and start navigating. In your home city, in your country, or abroad for vacation. It would be a shame to travel somewhere and discover you couldn’t do much with the offline maps because no navigation instructions were available. This is why our voice guided turn-by-turn navigation is not only available for 1, 2 or 29 countries; it is available for over 110 countries."
Nokia currently offers Nokia Maps and Transport and Nokia Drive on their Lumia handsets, and has provided regular updates with new and improved functionality, and quoted as saying today "We’re basically the world’s largest mapping company."
