In a blog post today, Nokia expounded a bit on the announcement this morning that Nokia Maps will be coming to Windows Phone 8, announcing that Nokia Drive (the Nokia Location Services powered turn by turn navigation system) is coming too, along with access to all of Nokia Location Services:
Today, we are making Nokia Drive available to other Windows Phone partners to offer a turn-by-turn navigation experience for people in over 110 countries. Nokia Drive is one of the key experiences on Nokia Lumia smartphones, thanks to its ease of use and the experience that has gone into developing our location-based services. With Nokia Drive on Windows Phone 8, we will make drive navigation effortless.
Nokia Drive is one of the major apps that on Nokia’s location platform. Today, we are also making this platform and its unrivalled quality of data and richness of features available on Windows Phone 8 for all partners. This means that Nokia’s Location platform will be central to the Windows Phone 8 experience, with the intention of developing smartphones that bring advanced location experiences. Windows Phone 8 partners and developers will be able to use our location assets to build location-based apps and experiences of superior quality.
Nokia has more quality location data than any smartphone manufacturer in the market. Our platform is the most advanced mobile location platform in the world because it offers true offline functionality (for the past six years), fast client-side map rendering (50 fps) and only requires 10 per cent of the bandwidth when compared to traditional server-side map platforms.
The Nokia location platform is the biggest in the world:
- We have maps data for more than 190 countries in more than 50 languages and navigation in more than 110 countries
- We collect information from Nokia Drive users and local authorities to provide traffic alerts in 26 countries, and also allow dynamic rerouting
- We have venue maps in over 5,000 shopping malls, train stations, airport, sports venues, etc. in 35 countries
- We support multi-modal routing: by car, on foot (including footpaths, shortcuts, etc. in over 400 cities) and by public transportation (over 100 cities)