Nokia just announced Here, an upcoming iOS app with voice-guided walking navigation, public transportation directions and offline capability, the latter two glaringly lacking in Apple’s in-house built iOS 6 mapping solution. In comparison, Microsoft’s Bing app only supports basic maps.
Google has problems of its own, rooted in belief that Apple won’t approve a native Google Maps app so it hasn’t even submitted it yet. Regardless of the scarcity of details, we’d love to hear your initial thoughts on Here so cast your vote now…
Per usual, don’t forget share your reasoning with fellow readers down in the comments.
Speaking at a press conference in San Francisco, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told reporters that the native Here app will work on iPhones, iPads and iPod touches.
From a media release:
Based on HTML5, it will include offline capabilities, voice-guided walk navigation, and public transport directions. The application is scheduled to be available for free download from Apple’s App Store in the coming weeks.
Offline support is another huge advantage of Here – consider that none of the premium iOS mapping offerings from Microsoft, Apple and Google support caching of mapping tiles.
Elop explained at the presser:
Many people have stared at their map waiting for their tiles to download for some time. We’re able to put that computational mapping data onto the devices, so that’s a significant improvement.
Offline support lets you download data for a specified area, which does wonders for rendering oft-used locations more quickly.
Not only that, offline caching reduces your network data consumption (and cell phone bill), location searches are performed more quickly and you can also search through cached areas without Wi-Fi and/or cellular connectivity.
So, discussion time.
How did you vote and why?