Nokia Ovi Maps
A bit fiddly, but the app and its maps are free and locally stored
Price: Free
Platform: Symbian S60
Traffic: Free
Performance: ★★★
Features: ★★★★
Value for money: ★★★★★★
Overall: ★★★★
Nokia is sidelining Symbian in favour of Windows Phone 7 on smartphones, casting doubt over the future of this free sat-nav app.
Ovi Maps is the only free sat-nav app this month to offer local storage of maps – and worldwide coverage at that. Using Nokia’s Ovi Suite to transfer everything can be fiddly, but once done you can navigate anywhere regardless of internet connection.
There’s nothing like the customisability of CoPilot, but you do get a one-box search, which allows you to enter keywords, addresses or postcodes, which can be carried out online or offline. There’s also multi-point route planning.
On the road, our experiences were mixed. Audio instructions are delivered clearly, but maps aren’t the easiest to read, with spindly road graphics and an abundance of pastel shades. There were no obvious map errors, but routing was average. It didn’t choose the best way through east London, and on the Liverpool test route it failed to offer the M6 Toll road.
We’re not fans of the user interface. Too much clicking is required, and buttons are tricky to tap with your arm outstretched. It needs a GPS fix to calculate a route, which is a pain, and the traffic service is pretty hopeless. You can have it updated automatically over your phone’s data connection, but there’s no easy way to view incidents on your route.
Nokia Ovi Maps can be frustrating, but it will get you from A to B more reliably than any of the other free apps on test thanks to its local map storage. Don’t dump your Nokia just yet.
