The Last Maps 2.0 Report of the Week

The Maps 2.0 Campaign in North America officially ended on January 3rd. Kristina will be sending out a survey to Maps Ambassadors tomorrow, and after that we’ll tally up the totals. We’ll announce the Top 25 Maps Ambassadors on Friday Jan 16th.

The final Report of the Week is not an a-typical report: Here’s an Ambassador, traveling with a friend, using Maps to reach a geographic location and then a point of interest. Sometimes (hopefully most of the time in our case) technology just works. The description of such times doesn’t have to be flowery to be effective, as pnksniper shows us here:

This week I had the pleasure of going out of the city to a location where I had never been before. I was riding along with a buddy who was picking up some things he had purchased online. He had directions in hand and it looked like a good trip to relax and talk. Once out of the city of Los Angeles, we started heading to the location, San Bernadino. I had never travelled out so far and was happy that we had Nokia Maps for the ride. The directions he printed out quoted that it would take close to an hour an 30 minutes to reach our destination. I let him know that I had input the location into my phone and Nokia Maps had calculated the trip to take closer to an hour. He found it strange that it would say that. I let him know that the program takes into account your current driving speed and realtime variables. This is done in realtime with all information downloaded from the internet, including maps. He was impressed. I informed him that II would navigate for him (well the phone would in real time) so he could keep his eyes on the road. He is a friend that knows I am enrolled in the S60 Ambassador campaign for maps and decided to let the phone take over for the rest of the trip. It was a smooth ride with great navigation, loud directions and indeed as fast as Nokia Maps had quoted. After picking up his item, it was time for some food. He suggested a couple locations (McDonals, Wendys, etc) I told him why not eat something different.

I suggested searching for a local eatery so that we could relax. Again I turned to the phone to find what we needed. I showed him that on Nokia Maps not only could you search for what you wanted ie “chinese” and it would find chinese food locations in the area. But you could also scroll through a list. He wondered how the phone could retain so much data, I let him know that if you can upload the maps to a memory card. But in my case since i have 3G i download on the fly the maps/information. He did recall me telling him earlier. He understood that phones had internet but didnt know that it could be used for such useful things. He uses a phone from the stone age :P. He was impressed and suggested that seems like a good choice since locations are always evolving and so is the internet. I told him “right on”. Although we did not dine in the area he was able to see how POI’s are readily available from the internet and how map content doesnt need to be loaded to the device and can be streamed seemless to the handset.

San Bernadino Valley (Wikipedia Commons)

Thanks pnksniper for writing our final Reprt of the Week. We’ll be confirming your snail mail address and getting your e71 loaner out to you soon.

See the rest of the Maps Ambassadors on Fri Jan 16th for our final Maps 2.0 North America post!