After a pleasingly brief public beta, Nokia's glazing its Maps 2.0 navigation app with a thick coating of gold and sending it off into a waiting world of S60-toting fiends to fend for itself. The new version underpins the GPS receivers in Nokia's 2008 smartphones but is also available as a free download for a variety of existing devices, offering key improvements that make it a totally viable nav system -- satellite view, traffic data, and a significantly retooled UI, most importantly, plus the addition of a dedicated pedestrian mode for those times when geographical confusion strikes while on foot. Optional packs add goodies like city guides and the all-important voice guided car navigation and ultimately make Maps 2.0 a non-free venture, but really, no full-featured nav system is -- and the initial download does quite a bit out of the box. Hit the read link to kick off the download.

[Via All About Symbian]

Nokia's just unveiled an interesting add-on to both its Ovi suite of multimedia services and its very capable Maps navigation app called "Maps on Ovi" (naturally). Perhaps sensing the trend toward connected, social navigation devices and services, Maps on Ovi allows users of Nokia Maps to sync routes both to and from devices, ultimately sharing planned and traveled trips online with other Ovi users. Seeing how waypoint searching and routing is something you probably don't want to do exclusively on your phone, the program sounds like a pretty brilliant idea from that aspect alone, and tying in the sharing capability is just icing on the cake. The tentative plan is to have a build ready for public use this summer; S60 devices (read: Nokia Maps clients) will be the first to benefit, but it sounds like Nokia wants to expand it to other platforms in the future.

Previously available only to a select group, Nokia is turning the beta version of its Maps 2.0 navigation app onto the masses. In addition to the car mode existing users will be familiar with, 2.0 adds "Walk," a new mode tailored to pedestrian use. Another new feature is the ability to purchase "multimedia guides" for destinations that hook you up with photo, video, and audio streams that detail places to go and things to see on your magical journey. As we'd previously mentioned, 2.0 also adds real-time traffic information and hybrid satellite views, both features that help to bring Maps in line with Google Maps for Mobile. The beta is available immediately, while a final cut is expected to be available in the second quarter of the year.

Separately, Nokia has announced that it'll be bringing its Maps franchise to Series 40, swinging open the door to high-function navigation on the company's mass-market, non-smartphone handsets. It'll be ready in the first half of 2008, though no plans have yet been outed regarding availability on specific Series 40 devices.

Though the refresh late last year was a welcome bonus, Nokia's Maps app that gets bundled with many of its S60 devices still lags Google Maps for Mobile in several key areas -- real-time traffic and satellite view, just to name a couple. Great news, though: Nokia's been hard at work crafting its next-gen navigation client, and it looks like it's shaping up to be a real gem. The software has been seeded to a few key folks in the public domain (but isn't yet available for download to the masses) so we're starting to see some first impressions trickle in, and in short, it looks like everything's better than it was before. The auto navigation screen is clearer and uses translucency to prevent large swaths of the map from being concealed, there's a new pedestrian mode, and satellite views and traffic data are now both available. There's no word yet on when the beta or the final version might go public, so we'll all have to be satisfied with the previews for the time being.

Maybe they were just full of holiday cheer, or maybe they just felt like the match really was made in heaven, but whatever the case, NAVTEQ shareholders "overwhelmingly" voted to approve the Nokia acquisition announced in October. The affirmation will reportedly pave the way for the $8.1 million deal to go final shortly, as antitrust regulators already signed off on it last week. Yep, looks like NokTEQ will be coming your way soon.

Following its February launch alongside the original N95, Nokia has now rolled out the "next phase" of its Maps navigation software as a free download available immediately. The new version seems to center around customer-requested improvements, including a new data counter, revamped user interface, improved search capabilities, and client software capable of transferring maps ten times as quickly as the original. Nokia is also taking the remainder of 2007 to update its coverage, eventually offering over 150 countries' worth of maps with 50 of them enabled for navigation. The service isn't free, but the download'll buy ya a three-day trial -- so if you've got a device on the compatibility list, check it out.

Read - Press release
Read - Nokia Maps

If you've been enjoying Google's (free) GOOG-411 service, but felt that it would serve your needs infinitely better if it just included some pictorial delight, you're in luck. The voice search service has undergone a recent update, and now you can simply say "map it" during your GOOG-411 call to receive a text message "with the details of your search plus a link to a map of your results." Leave it to Google to remove the need for, um, anything else in the world one application at a time.

If that handy SD slot in your Treo (or similar smartphone) has gone lonely long enough, you've probably been waiting for "that killer device" to slam down in there and boast about. Thankfully, that time has seemingly come, as Spectec's latest SDIO GPS receiver packs a whole lot of functionality into a minuscule (and sleek) package. Unlike alternative GPS attachments for your handset, the SDG-810 provides a SiRF Star III 20-channel tracking adornment, is WASS-enabled, and sports a microSD slot to carry up to 2GB of excess data (like maps, for instance) since your original flash memory slot just got occupied. While pricing information wasn't readily available, this nifty smartphone must-have should be available in your neck of the woods (read: everywhere) real soon.

[Via GearDiary]

Undeterred by newfangled, unproven technologies like GPS, a group of researchers at Southampton University in the UK have devised a new means of getting interactive maps on your cellphone: by snapping digital pics of readily available paper maps. Thankfully, there's actually quite a bit more to it than that (though we've seen worse ideas). Dubbed, Map Snapper, the app will take that fresh pic of a portion of your paper map, send it off to a central server for analyzing, and promptly send it back to you, complete with details on all nearby points of interest. Just rinse and repeat every couple of blocks. While the developers are quick to acknowledge reality and admit that their system is useless for anyone with a GPS-equipped cellphone, they're nevertheless looking for commercial partners to bundle Map Snapper with their handsets -- meaning, of course, you can't get it right now.

[Via NewScientistTech]