Flavour of future GPS services tasted today

INTERNATIONAL – GPS has achieved unprecedented buzzword status on the mobile scene of late. What with Nokia CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, last week sparking a vision of GPS as standard when he spoke of expecting to ship “35 million GPS-enabled Nokia devices in 2008, which is equal to the entire GPS device market in 2007″.

Add to that Nokia’s head of location-based activities, Michael Halbherr, recently telling Reuters that Nokia is on track to have half of its devices shipping with GPS by 2012, and GPS is on the tip of every tongue that happens to talk about the future of location-based services. But today, the reality of serious GPS mobile services has stepped further into the limelight with the final version of Nokia Maps 2.0 ditching its beta badge and going official.

With ten Nokia devices already boasting onboard GPS, Nokia Maps 2.0 is one of the first apps tailored to seriously begin pushing location-based services, such as local multimedia-packed city guides and detailed personal navigation tools. Having been downloaded over 240,000 times since its beta debut in February, Nokia Maps 2.0 has been fully updated, with focus on improved optional in-car navigation with faster routing, quality on-foot guidance with in-depth contextual info on your close surroundings and a hugely improved interface.

Have you used Nokia Maps 2.0? If you have, let us know what you think of it in the comments section below.

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Tags | GPS, Maps, navigation, Nokia Maps 2.0, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo