Maps Report of the Week: Flags Feature Impresses

Our Maps Report of the Week comes from Jamaalism who writes about a feature I hadn’t thought to highlight to my own friends: The little flag that appears about ethnic food restaurants. Kind of a cool feature IMO. Read all about it:

I was telling a buddy at work to register for his @ovi.com account so that he can secure himself a good username. As nothing better has come along since the N95 8GB’s release, we both use it as our primary device, him for about half a year, myself, since about April ‘08. I recommended that he registered for one using Nokia Chat…so he did.

After that, we decided to login to chat to each other back and forth. He was interested in seeing the ’send location’ feature at work so I when I went out for lunch, I did exactly that - I sent him my location.

When I met him at his desk later that day, he told me how surprised he was when it opened the Nokia Maps application on his handset and showed my face @ my location on the map. I then told him the other cool features about Nokia Maps like being able to see nearby restaurants and, in some cases, even be able to identify the ethnicity of the restaurant. For instance, some restaurants would show a Chinese flag over the restaurant icon to indicate that they serve Chinese food. We both think this is an extremely neat feature and one that we would use both locally and abroad.

When he asked me how I knew all this stuff, I informed him that I am a Nokia ambassador (cuz I actually forgot about this campaign during that conversation) and that they’re actually running this campaign right now. He laughed and said he’ll probably start using Maps 2.0 now as he never did before.

Feedback

I find 2.0 to be a bit choppy, the scrolling doesn’t seem to be as smooth as Google Maps. The raw functionality easily surpasses Google Maps but the search and usability seems to be a bit easier and more intuitive on Google.

Now that they have ’street view’, I’m hoping Nokia will counter this by integrating Friend View, Sports Tracker, Vine and Chat with Maps so that it can be one powerhouse application. Please please please do this!! For your own good!!

Thanks Jamaalism! For submitting this week’s “Report of the Week” we’ll be sending you an E71 loaner device. Just make sure your address is up-to-date in the Ambassador website so that we can get it to you!