14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia Beta Labs has recently updated one of the solutions that Nokia owners can enjoy on their devices, Ovi Maps Beta. The update is only a minor one, bringing along a series of fixes for the application's crashes, as well as some improvements for the functionality and appearance of the Premium services.
There are a lot of features that users can enjoy with the Ovi Maps Beta, including My position, Find places, Favourites, Drive (Included with the Drive license), Walk (Included with the City explorer license), Weather, Michelin and Lonely Planet, as well as Events. The software solution also comes with Text-to-speech functionality, which is only available for English and German voice guidance.
According to Nokia Beta Labs, there are a wide range of differences that this release sports when compared to previous versions, including:
- Improved application start up - Brand new menu with one touch access to content and services - New and improved one-box search - New features in car navigation service: ‘Drive home’ and ‘Track me’, - New features in the pedestrian navigation service: ‘Walk home’ and ‘Track me’, - Text-to-speech for voice guidance in car and pedestrian navigation, currently available for English and German. More languages will follow for the commercial release.
However, the release still lacks support for a few features, including: English only for the application language: Other languages will follow in the commercial release No satellite and terrain maps (only in Walk mode) Traffic updates options are only manual or timed, e.g. Every 5, 10, 20, 40 minutes. The Ovi Maps Beta can be used on the following Nokia mobile phones: Nokia N97, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition and Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Users can also enjoy an Ovi Maps for web Beta solution, which works with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 and Firefox 3 and 3.5 on Windows XP and Vista computers, as well as with Safari 3 and 4 on Mac OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x devices.