The competition on the mobile navigation market is really starting to turn cutthroat, with both smartphone and PND manufacturers scrambling to get as much market share as possible. And now, Nokia, which remains the world's most important handset manufacturer, has just made a bold move that is sure to draw more customers to its products, but also to attracted the hatred of pretty much all GPS navigation devices' manufacturers out there.

So, the Finnish company has announced that it plans to release a new version of Ovi Maps for its smartphones including high-end walk and drive navigation at no extra cost. The new version of Ovi Maps has high-end car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries in 46 languages and traffic information for more than ten countries, as well as detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

"Why have multiple devices that work in only one country or region? Put it all together, make it free, make it global and you almost double the potential size of the mobile navigation market," explained Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. "Nokia is the only company with a mobile navigation service for both drivers and pedestrians that works across the world. Unlike the legacy car navigation manufacturers, we don't make you buy maps for different countries or regions even if you're only visiting for a few days. We offer both navigation and maps free of charge, with all the high-end functionality and features that people now expect."

For Nokia, removing the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians allows the company to quickly activate a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services. In other words, it allows it to tap into a huge market segment, which is likely to grow even more in the future.

Unfortunately, not all of its handsets will support this new feature. In fact, we're only talking about the Nokia N97mini, 5800 XpressMusic, E72, E55, E52, 5800 navigation edition, 5230, 6710 navigator, 6730 classic and X6. However, all of the new Nokia smartphones set to arrive on the market starting with March 2010 will also enable this free navigation feature.

"This is a game changing move. By leveraging our NAVTEQ acquisition, and our context sensitive service offering, we can now put a complete navigation system in the palm of your hand, wherever in the world you are, whenever you need it - and at no extra cost," concluded Anssi Vanjoki. "By adding cameras at no extra cost to our phones we quickly became the biggest camera manufacturer in the world. The aim of the new Ovi Maps is to enable us to do the same for navigation." And, as far as we can see, Nokia's really good chances of doing just that, and get pretty much every remaining PND manufacturer out of the market.


We are just a few, but there are many of you, Softpedia users, out there. That's why we thought it would be a good idea to create an email address for you to help us a little in finding gadgets we missed. Interesting links are bound to be posted with recognition going mainly to those who submit. The address is .