Featured 
I’m a huge Maps user to get around here in Delhi. Be it Nokia’s Ovi Maps or the occasional bit of Google Maps, I’m still relatively new to the city and hence dont quite know all the places yet.
Which is why the N900 last year, while a pretty slick piece of hardware, was a disappointment in the GPS section because it had a very bare bones Ovi Maps client. Luckily the N9 has an updated version of Nokia Maps, with a client that has an even better/faster UI than the Symbian version of the app.
Starting it up takes a couple seconds though, but once loaded, it’s good to go.
There’s the usual Map-view with the familiar Nokia Maps colors and markings for roads and public transport lines, a 3D mode, etc. All of which you can toggle.
There’s also a Satellite view (which isnt anywhere as Google’s Satellite view unfortunately, atleast here in India).
You can head into the settings menu to tinker with a lot more options.
For example, there’s also tons of categories to choose from if you only want to see a certain category of venues.
And since Nokia maps lets you sync favorites with the browser version, you can create and sync favorites.
Another advantage of the new Nokia Maps is that you can choose to download an entire country’s maps for offline usage.
Right from the phone itself. Very convenient. And lastly is the main settings menu which lets you turn on two-finger rotation (dont know why its switched off by default) and other features.
All this, on version 4.0.31 of Nokia/Ovi Maps. New updates might bring in new features and change things, yada yada.
Coming back to the maps, you can search for a place or venue, or use the very useful (imho) ‘Nearby’ button at the bottom of the screen, to see what’s nearby.
Venues are shown with a nice little blue marker, that you can tap on to view more info.
This will show you the location, phone number or contact information, reviews of the place, all very useful info.
Ofcourse if you’re trying to figure out how to get there, you can always choose to get directions.
Hitting the ‘Get Directions’ button starts up the ‘Drive‘ Navigation app, which is the GPS turn-by-turn voice navigation feature of Nokia Maps, in a nice separate app. There’s also walk and public transport directions if needed.
I think I prefer it that way. Both apps share Map data so you dont need to re-download maps separately for them or anything.
Hitting ‘start navigation‘ turns the map into a 3D view, and kicks off the turn-by-turn navigation.
There’s also plenty of options to tinker around with, like day/night mode, 2D/3D view, etc.
You can also download a Navigation voice, or turn it off if you arnt too fond of it.
I’m quite liking the 3D view, which shows you a couple important buildings in 3D when you pass by them on the navigation map.
Moving onto apps. The most asked question so far has been “But how is the app scene on the N9 like?“
The Nokia Store on the N9 has a very decent amount of apps, games and audio/video for the MeeGo flagship.
The Store itself, has gotten a huge facelift, now looking way more slicker, and better organised than before.
There are quite a couple games. Nothing very high profile yet, but there’s Galaxy on Fire 2, NFS Shift and Angry Birds pre-loaded on the N9. The Store doesnt seem to have many popular titles otherwise.
The Audio and Video section basically had a lot of videos, with some choice audio clips available for use as a ringtone or alert tone, me thinks.
When you tap on an item to open it, you get the following nice, clean minimalistic view.
There’s a brief description of the App/Game/Media item, the cost, the size (in kb/MB), user reviews of it, and lastly the best part:
Nice glorious full screenshots. I hated the tiny thumbnail screenshots they had on the Symbian client for the Nokia Store, so this was refreshing. Lastly, you have the ‘My Stuff‘ section which lists recent/all downloads from the store, access your Nokia account settings, yada yada.
Alright! So as you can see, the Nokia N9 does a pretty okay job at maps. There’s no Google maps client for it ‘officially‘ yet but there is Ovi/Nokia Maps which is more than capable. Atleast it’s a whole lot better than what the N900 got.
But to answer the App question, the App scene is virtually the same as the N900′s predicament last year. There’s Nokia-made apps for Twitter and Facebook pre-installed, and a couple games as well. The Nokia/Ovi Store has a couple apps for Foursquare, file managers and pretty much the bare necessities, but dont expect the latest version of Angry Birds to ever get released or updated on the N9.
Just to give you a better idea, here’s a quick overview video:
Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories.
Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus 
or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff
Nice! Didnt know Alien Davlik was coming to the N9/MeeGo. That would be seriously awesome!
dont u think the gps lock is very poor? it take minutes to lock especially indoor.
Really? It was pretty okay on my unit. Took longer than most Nokia devices but still under a minute ish heh.
You guys forget to mention one thing about N9: Alien Davlik. IIRC it was released/should be released for the N9. What does it do? Allow you to use Android apps in Nokia N9/N900.Pretty awesome IMO.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
Like