Nowadays many mobile-phones are equipped with an internal gps-antenna and have pretty high-resolution displays, which makes them a considerable alternative for the usual satnavs.
In case of Nokia the software which is normally shipped with any gps-capable mobile-phone is called “Nokia Maps” or “Ovi Maps”, as Nokia bought the digital mapmaker Navteq the producer of ovi-maps some years ago. Nokia made the whole card material available for free in January 2010, so anyone can use it as long as he wants, without paying a thing.
I mainly have four problems with Nokia maps on my mobile-phone:
- Out of the box there is no map data not on phone – you either have to have an active wireless-LAN connection or an active gprs/edge connection in order to download the map data. As in a everyday use you’ll be very lucky having a wireless-LAN connection and will have to download the map data via gprs/edge which is very expensive unless you signed a flatrate-contract.
- As a GNU/Linux user I think it’s a disadvantage that the Ovimaps software is only offered for windows OS.
- You’ll never know when Nokia reconsiders his decision to give away their maps for free. Just recently you could see how greedy Nokia is as they took a lot of money from Microsoft to ship Windows Phone 7 on their future devices and literally dropped the whole Maemo/MeeGo project which they initialized together with Intel like a hot potato.
- A mobile-phone with a gps-antenna should be used like a normal satnav thus the download of the map data as you need them makes no sense to me at all.
The only considerable solution to me out of this four points was to download all available mapdata. After some searching in various web-forums I quickly found out, that you can directly download the mapdata from Nokias servers if you know the link and the numeric representation of the country or region you want, as the maps are distributed with file-names like 3523001.zip. At first I downloaded the newest mapdata I found which sadly made the map-application crash at startup. Lacking the possibility to find out which exact version of the map data I needed, because there isn’t anything helpful displayed in the info-page of the application I had to find another way to find that out.
The answer of the problem was: WireShark (a multi OS packet sniffer).
Continue reading Nokia Ovi-Maps 3.0 0.1.25.114 direct Downloadlinks und Downloadscript for Maemo N900 without using Map Loader