The world’s leading handset manufacturer, Nokia, bent on defining “social location”, today announced an update to Ovi Maps and the new Ovi Maps Player API.
Ovi Maps is the location-based arm of Nokia’s online Ovi platform, a suite of services that are synchronized between the desktop web and mobile devices. The updated Ovi Maps , in beta, includes vector-graphic, high resolution satellite and terrain maps in both 2D and 3D views. It includes 3D landmarks for over 200 cities, offers the ability to pan, zoom, rotate, tilt, perform fly-overs, view in night mode, perform fly-throughs and pulls additional POI data from Michelin, Lonely Planet and WCities. Ovi Maps also lets you flip between Drive and Walk navigation modes depending on your method of travel and doles out both 24 hour and 5-day weather forecasts.
Because mobile/desktop synchronicity is key to Ovi services, you can also sit down at your computer at home and plan routes, save favorite POIs and send all this stuff to your mobile phone for later use.
The Ovi Maps Player API is something completely new and is a bid to pull in developers who’ll hopefully build useful applications on top of the mapping platform. The API enables developers to easily embed Ovi Maps in their website using Javascript, a programming languages known to the majority of web developers. Lonely Planet, the travel website, is one of the first major web properties to implement the API and developers can submit an application to be granted access. Once again, Nokia focuses here on the ability to easily synchronize online map embeds with mobile.
