It has just been announced that Nokia is selling its HERE Maps part of its business to a German car consortium (including Audi, BMW and others) for $3 billion – Quite a price for what is still one of the better electronic mapping businesses.
No doubt, HERE Maps will find its way into many a German car’s satnav system soon.
HERE Maps has long been a favourite of mine, even several years ago when using Nokia Symbian smartphones, Ovi (HERE) Maps was fast, accurate and easy to use.
Google Maps has since become the market leader, and has overshadowed the satnav industry for several years now, particularly as phones’ screens grew ever more in size.
Google’s mapping applications have become very useful, with a huge amount of location data stored on them, they can often surpass satnav systems as they hold local business information which integrates seamlessly with the web, Google searches, Google Mail and a host of other connected applications.
HERE Maps has always been a slightly disconnected system, with it’s own website that sort of connects with Nokia and Microsoft Lumia accounts on Windows Phone.
Nevertheless, Nokia’s maps have been accurate and simple to use (if lacking a bit of functionality) – The best reason to use them has always been that they have been free to use and you can download entire countries to your mobile to use completely offline. Google Maps does have this option, and it is getting easier to use, but it still throws too many tantrums in real world use to be considered comparable to HERE Maps.
Nokia is a smaller and quite dissimilar company to what it was only 5-10 years ago. With the sale of one of their better (and remaining) products, Nokia’s bones are beginning to look like they’ve been picked quite clean now.
There is still a glimmer of hope that come next Winter Nokia might just re-enter the phone business, but this is nowhere near certain, plus they will still have a lot of red tape to cut through – as well as find a decent manufacturer and rebuild their reputation.
The main question here is also what OS would Nokia choose? Sensible predictions would be either Android or a proprietary OS that would have to be something very special indeed.
There are still Nokia fans out there, myself included, but Nokia is looking like they are concentrating on producing a few niche tech products such as the OZO 360 camera.
If they keep selling/losing the good bits of the business, the next household product that bears the Nokia name could once again be a pair of wellington boots.
