Nokia Giving Away Free Navigation App

[Antoine Wright]

Thats a bummer...for the low cost, its a pretty nice device. Although it could use a speed bump. Lack of GPS built in is likely the killer here

Ovi Maps is much better an app when its using GPS. The E63 can use it, but the user would either need to use triangulation and/or the map loader.

[Antoine Wright]

Update seems to be hitting the N97 today (use the device's Software Update app to see it). I didn't have enough RAM to install it (!!!). Had to uninstall the previous edition of Maps and Nokia Messaging Email to get it (NME really is a memory hog, app was 1MB, but I had over 15MB of RAM eaten by it).

Coming back to this when its done installing...
--
Installed now
Much faster than the previous version of the app. Some of the settings are refined, one can spend a lot of time in here.
I dig the weather piece, but it really needs to connect to a widget on the homescreen - do people really keep a mapping app open all day?
GPS lock is faster
User interface has been refined a good bit more on the maps themselves. The maps also look a lot clearer and load faster over the same 3G connection that I have here.
Nokia pulled my Ovi account automatically (possibly from Ovi Contacts since I've always got that running) - I'm impressed.

Overall, not bad. Not bad at all.
I've got to figure out a reason for using voice navigation - honestly, I don't like people telling me directions along the way, just show me a map and I can read the signs :-/

[Hook]

Congratulations.

Nokia's memory partitioning scheme on the N97, at least from what little I've picked up, seems insane. How can you ever be short on memory on a mobile device with 32 GB on board. Why it is partitioned and not all available to all programs on an as-needed basis is beyond me. I can't believe there is really a big difference between "Ram" and the rest of the memory at this point. Isn't it all basically flash?

Yeah, I know, I'm not an engineer.

[Antoine Wright]

Congratulations.

Nokia's memory partitioning scheme on the N97, at least from what little I've picked up, seems insane. How can you ever be short on memory on a mobile device with 32 GB on board. Why it is partitioned and not all available to all programs on an as-needed basis is beyond me. I can't believe there is really a big difference between "Ram" and the rest of the memory at this point. Isn't it all basically flash?

Yeah, I know, I'm not an engineer.

In simplistic terms, it is mostly the same. However, because you want to guarantee the life of the device's memory, sections of RAM have special purposes.

In the case of the N97, there wasn't enough memory physically allocated to applications which continually run processes - and in some cases apps that need to be stored in the same places those processes run. And so, like many WinMobile folks found out years ago, that's a formula for issues for some users.

Nokia has addressed this mostly, however there's only so much that can be done. It was shortsighted in some respects, but my thinking is that the hardware was built for the kind of use where applications - meaning the native written ones - would be more or less not the norm for it. Of course, that has not played out, and hence the issues some have had.

Applications such as Nokia Messaging Email (still in Beta) weren't designed to take advantage of the extra internal storage as it saves all messages/logs and the app itself onto the main memory. There are reasons for this, but its also why I and probably others find it necessary to delete the app and reinstall - you end up getting 10-15MB back just from doing that. That's an app issue, and has been raised often; whether it will be addressed or not before the beta of this app is done is another question.

Ovi Maps does this right by using the 32GB of space to store the dynamic/side-loaded maps, and leaves the application in the main RAM. Its not exactly a light app at 8MB (some pieces such as the weather, guides, etc. need to be optional installs or manual uninstalls from it) but it does present a much better solution for memory-friendly and memory-constrained devices alike.

[Hook]

Yes, I was pretty impressed with Ovi Maps on my 5800, even with an 8Gb chunk of my memory swallowed up. Boy, that GPS lock is sweet fast compared to what it used to be. Used to be I could get a cup of coffee whle it found the sats, even if I was out on my stoop.

This is a shining example of what you were talking obout when Nokia's development efforts come out of beta. For all the complaining I do, they get an awful lot right. The curse is, what they get right makes me impatient with the stuff that messes up.

[Varjak]

Congratulations.

Nokia's memory partitioning scheme on the N97, at least from what little I've picked up, seems insane. How can you ever be short on memory on a mobile device with 32 GB on board. Why it is partitioned and not all available to all programs on an as-needed basis is beyond me. I can't believe there is really a big difference between "Ram" and the rest of the memory at this point. Isn't it all basically flash?

Yeah, I know, I'm not an engineer.

I guess they have some old Palm engineers. My LD has 4 GB on the the harddrive; but only 64MB of usable RAM.