Nokia seems to have become a little GPS Obsessed itself, rolling out a new phone, update and a couple of new geo-locational initiatives yesterday.
Rolling out the flagship NSeries N97 is the focus of everyone’s attention right now. Built upon the concepts of internet connectivity and ’social location’, the Nokia N97 has integrated assisted GPS sensors and an electronic compass, making it easy for owners to update social networks with real-time location information. It also features an impressively large, widescreen 3.5-inch touch display, full QWERTY keyboard, and ‘always on’ social network window.
The N97 supports up to 48 GB of memory–32 GB internally, and 16 GB from a microSD card–and has a 5 megapixel camera with high-end Carl Zeiss optics. With full support for Nokia’s Music Store, the N97 has plenty of room to store multimedia files and can continuously playback music for 1.5 days. Finally it can capture DVD quality video in widescreen format and supports Ovi Sharing over WLAN or HSDPA.
Nokia also rolled out Nokia Maps 3.0 in beta as well as Ovi’s online mapping platform. The free service lets you plan trips on your PC and sync them with your mobile phone. The Nokia 3.0 upgrades include high-resolution aerial images, 3D landmarks for 216 cities, terrain maps, and route overview when planning routes and also on Nokia’s Drive turn-by-turn directional system. Users will also have access to real-time traffic information in select countries with included safety camera alerts. Taking a hint from events companies like Eventful, Nokia will also release a WCities real-time events guide to keep you up-to-date regarding events in your immediate location.
Finally, the company has officially completed its acquisition of Symbian, now owning more than 99.9% of Symbian’s shares not already owned. All Symbian employees are slated to move over to Nokia February 1, 2009. The acquisition is part of Nokia’s plan to open source the Symbian mobile operating system. It hopes to complete opening the OS in June 2010, after which it will be licensed royalty-free. The project is running under the guise of Symbian Foundation and includes AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, ST-NXP Wireless, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
