Location-based service Nokia Drive, that was exclusive to the Lumia range is now reported to be available to other Windows Phone 8 partners as well. The application ‘will be central’ to Microsoft’s upcoming mobile platform by delivering turn-by-turn navigation in over 110 countries.
Partners and developers of the new OS are said to have access to the Finland-based manufacturer’s location assets. Through this, they will be able to create navigation-based applications of their own and share the experience with others. Currently, the location services from Nokia cater to more than 190 nations with maps data and over 110 countries with navigation. It even has support for not less than 50 languages.
“Today, we are making Nokia Drive available to other Windows Phone 8 partners to offer a turn-by-turn navigation experience for people in over 110 countries. Nokia Drive is one of the key experiences on Nokia Lumia smartphones, thanks to its ease of use and the experience that has gone into developing our location-based services. With Nokia Drive on Windows Phone 8, we will make drive navigation effortless,” expressed Pino Bonetti, Senior Marketing Communications Manager at Nokia via a post on the Nokia Conversations blog.
In addition to the aforementioned features, it offers offline functionality, quick client-side map rendering at approximately 50fps and is said to consume only 10% of bandwidth compared to traditional server-side map platforms. With this adoption, the application in question could just replace the Bing Maps service which already utilizes Nokia backend services.
As we have already pointed out, the Nokia Drive location-based service is now available for all Windows Phone 8 partners.