14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion is hard at work with the inclusion of a series of new features with its map client available for the popular Blackberry smartphones.
According to the company, it has been focused on the delivery of a series of new, appealing features for its BlackBerry Maps offering, so that developers and users alike take advantage of an enhanced experience.
“Hello developers – I have great news! As part of our continuous effort to improve our map client and the data services behind it, we have added some really exciting features to our BlackBerry Maps offering,” the company announced via a recent blog post.
“Whether your application uses an embedded MapField or simply invokes BlackBerry Maps to render map data, you can start taking advantage of these new features today!”
The first important feature that should be noted here is that data coverage has been extended to an additional number of 34 new countries.
Among the newly added countries, we can count Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, New Zealand, The Philippines and Taiwan.
“I have no doubt that the addition of these new countries in our database will open up a lot of opportunities for app developers in those regions. The figure above shows the current coverage of the BlackBerry Maps service,” the aforementioned blog post continues.
At the same time, the company notes that it was focused on enhancing the visual appearance of the maps, and that it did so via a stronger rendering engine, as well as via a new color scheme.
“New POI databases for hospitals, universities/colleges, police stations, train/subway stations, shopping centers, parking, parks and airports were also added wherever available, in order to make the maps as meaningful as possible to the end user,” the post continues.
Additional info on the visual changes that were made to BlakcBerry Maps can be found in the screenshots attached to this article. Additional info was made available in the said blog post here.
Users interested in benefitting from the latest features in BlackBerry Maps should update their devices as follows:
Updating BlackBerry Maps with BlackBerry Device Software 4.7 or Lower
1. From the home screen, go to Maps. 2. Press the [Menu] key and select Options. 3. Press the [Menu] key and select Clear Cache. 4. Select Delete when prompted to delete cached entries.
Updating BlackBerry Maps with BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 before Bundle 1057
The update was made available for download here. However, users can also apply the update for BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 after Bundle 1057 to receive the new map coverage and the visual design, but no new POI icons will be available for them.
Updating BlackBerry Maps with BlackBerry Device Software 5.0 after Bundle 1057
1. From the home screen, go to Maps. 2. Press the [Menu] key and select Options. 3. Press the [Menu] key and select Clear Cache. 4. Select Delete when prompted to delete cached entries.
Updating BlackBerry Maps with BlackBerry Device Software 6.0
1. From the home screen, go to Maps. 2. Press the [Menu] key and select Options. 3. Press Global Map Options. 4. Press the [Menu] key and select Clear Cache.
