Nokia HERE Maps arrives for Samsung smartphones
Nokia has announced the availability of their maps app for Samsung devices starting today. Nokia HERE isn’t Google Maps, and you may be asking yourself why you’d bother using it over Google’s home-cooked goodness. Believe it or not, Nokia HERE is actually one of the most robust and complete turn-by-turn solutions out there in terms of actual navigation.
For starters, it has “true” offline maps that you can download instead of Google’s cache-based system. You can download entire countries at a time and don’t have to worry about caching specific areas, and searching works offline just as it does online.
On the other hand, Google Maps only allows you to cache a specific area, and there’s a set limit to how much of the map you can cache. Many folks have issues going beyond the city view for any fairly large cities. To top that off, Google Maps’ cache is cleared on a regular basis (around every month) so you’re always having to make sure the area you need is cached before heading out onto the road. And search doesn’t work offline, so there’s that.
Nokia also has very solid rerouting options and traffic reports to help you get where you want to go faster. It’s not that Google’s traffic options are bad (they’are actually great), but Nokia HERE is one of the few that can rival it.
The app is free to download on the Samsung Apps Store for select Samsung smartphones (Nokia says it’s designed for any Samsung smartphone on Jelly Bean or higher with 1GB of RAM) so be sure to check it out if you’re wondering what the hype is all about.
[via Nokia]