With the launch of Nokia’s Lumia devices in India, the Windows Phone ecosystem is just about setting started in India and there is some very good news already. The Windows Phone Marketplace has just hit 50,000 apps, but numbers don’t say much when apps you use daily aren’t available on the platform.

Thankfully, all of that is about to change. A bunch of free locally relevant apps for users in India has just hit the Marketplace and all of them are well designed and must haves.

• NDTV: The app does what you would expect, news, live tiles, live streams from NDTV 24×7, NDTV India, NDTV Profit and NDTV GoodTimes. Also present are photo galleries, cricket scorecards and market watch sections. You can also choose to live stream just the audio.

• NDTV Good Times: The app from India’s leading lifestyle channel. Lets you watch latest featured videos on varied topics like food, cuisine, travel, fashion. Also lets you catch up on previous episodes of your favorite shows like Highway on My Plate, Yogasutra, Bollywood Confidential, Chakhle India, Band Baja Barat and many more. Also present are sections on sections on travel, luxury, gadgets, fashion and wellness.

• Times Of India: I had already demoed this app when it was in development and I’m glad to say its finally available. It brings breaking news and  coverage of national, international, city, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, business, health, science and technology topics. Also present are live cricket scores and a complete scorecard; local news from more than 30 cities; latest movie reviews by critics as well as readers; photo galleries; and top videos from news, business, sports, entertainment and lifestyle categories.

• Economic Times: The sister app for TOI, the business paper of the Times group.

• IBN Live: News, streamed content, live tiles, playback of popular shows like Face The Nation, Devil’s Advocate and The Week That Wasn’t.

• Book My Show: One app I was waiting for, makes looking up movie & cinema listings, synopsis & reviews a breeze. You can also carry out bookings from the phone using secure mobile payments options. Even lets you pick your seat and redeem offers.

• timesPoynt: A free application powered by data from timescity.com, provides users with the unique ability to search their local area for events, movies, restaurants and nightlife. timesPoynt provides users with the ability to move beyond discovery of their local area to click-to-call businesses, get directions, browse listing websites, send details to a friend or add listings to their calendar or address book. timesPoynt also features a fully integrated weather homescreen and the ability to search for long-term forecasts.

• yapf: It builds on the Google or Bing POI database to find places nearby by by searching a set of predefined categories or by manual search. Features augmented reality to view your results through your phone camera. You can also pin the search tile to the home screen for quick access, or pin a single place and the live tile will update with the distance to it.

• India Today: The India Today application allows users to view up-to-date news articles, images, videos and live TV served through the India Today Network. The application is powered by India Today, a popular news magazine.  The app consists of latest & breaking news, sports news, political news, cricket updates, entertainment news, Bollywood & Hollywood news, movie reviews, celebrity interviews, images and videos.

• Business Today: India Today’s sister app, the Business Today application allows users to view up-to-date news articles, images, videos and Stock updates served through the India Today Network.  The application is powered by Business Today, India’s no. 1 business magazine.  The app consists of business news & articles, stock updates, business analysis  and videos.

• Snapdeal: India’s Groupon equivalent, the website brings upto 90% discounts on dining, health and beauty services, branded products, travel and more.

• Bollywood Hungama: Movie reviews, trailers, first look, news and the like.

• Flipkart: Fairly basic, but a good start. Flipkart is India’s Amazon when it comes to online retail, includes movies, music, games, mobiles, cameras, computers and electronics.

So there you go, those are 13 excellent Windows Phone apps that are completely free. If we keep getting locally relevant apps at this pace for Windows phone, I dare say we’ll have a credible fight for marketshare come 2012.

The only thing the developers need to guard against is making apps and forgetting them, regular updates are just as important!

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Windows Phone has been getting some decent traction when it comes to mainstream apps, with the Marketplace hitting 40,000 apps recently. However, the real challenge is getting locally relevant apps for the users and I’m glad to see Windows Phone is doing well here as well.

At the Nokia Strategy Summit we were given a sneak peak at some of the India centric apps that are coming for Windows Phone and the chief among those that caught my eye were official apps for online retailer Flipkart, the ticket booking portal Book My Show and the very popular newspaper Times of India.

Fortunately I was able to get some hands on time with the Book My Show app (which I was really looking forward to) and Times of India (another favourite) and both of them nicely imbibe the Metro UI. I must stress that the versions that you see here are early alphas/betas and it may be some time before we see them in the Marketplace.

Book My Show

.

Times of India

.

What are the other locally relevant apps you are looking forward to?

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The MeeGo Harmattan running Nokia N9 may be the last of its kind, but there seems to be no death of quality apps that are coming out for the device. It already has apps for Facebook, Twitter and a few games like Angry Birds and Need For Speed built in, but there are a few key apps which are missing.

In this post I have complied a list of must have apps for the N9, all of which are free. Most of these apps are available from the Nokia Store and clicking on the name should take you to the download page. Lets get started.

• DropN9: As the name suggests, its a Dropbox client for the Nokia N9. The app lets you download and upload filed in multiples and is a must have if you are a dropbox user.

• Internet Radio: An neat little Internet Radio app for the N9, that features a UI is similar to the default music player with album art being replaced by cover art for the featured radio stations. Discovery is helped along by ‘Hot Picks’, Locations, Language and Genre sections. Detailed post here.

• Phone Torch: No frills app that lets you use the inbuilt LED flash as a torch. Launch the app and it immediately turns on the LED and exiting the app closes it.

• Photo Enhancer: A free app from Nokia that lets you put filters on images and then share them. There are a bunch of options available like sepia, grayscale, high contrast and so on.

• Simple Mirror: There is no way to use the front camera on the N9, unless you are making a video call. But if you would like to use the device as a mirror, does the job well.

• gPodder:  A great podcast client with full integration to the gpodder.net web service and a unique user interface, supporting YouTube and Soundcloud feeds in addition to normal audio and video podcast feeds. gPodder will help you manage and synchronize your podcast subscription and listening status (including resuming, streaming and downloading). Discover new, free content via gpodder.net’s podcast directory.

• File Manager: The N9 comes without an inbuilt file manager and the this free apps fills in perfectly. Its light weight and does everything you would expect from an app of this nature.

• Battery Usage: This app mimics the battery usage graph that you may have seen on Android devices. In addition to telling you which app eats how much battery, it can also tell you how much of that battery was consumed in the background and how much was drained while the app was actually in use. This will help you decide if you can leave the app running or whether you should exit everytime you are done with it.

• City Scene: The app lets you explore a bunch of cities in the US and Europe in 3D, much like Google Street view, but with a few extra features.

Shortcuts: The N9 has a set of 4 quick access shortcuts which you can bring up by swiping up for a short distance and holding it there. The problem is that you cannot change these without an app. Enter Shortcuts which lets you change the four of these by simply dragging an app of your choice to the current location of the shortcut.

Ionic: An ebook reader for the N9 that supports the EPUB format. It supports navigation by swipe or the volume keys, display themes, brightness control, orientation locking at many more. Create bookmarks with notes, jump to bookmarks or chapters. The Library feature allows ordering books by author or title, inspecting book details, and importing books downloaded from the web.

Sports Tracker: A long favourite of Nokia users, Sports Tracker lets you track and analyze your workouts, share workout data and photos with your friends. You can also track everything online on the developer’s website.

• ScreenshotMee: It lets you take screenshots using the proximity sensor, just activate the app in the background, navigate to the screen you want to capture and cover the proximity sensor on the top right of the device. Then you can choose to save the screengrab or take a new one.

• Photo Frame: Another app published by Nokia that lets you frame pictures and then share them. There are a bunch of frames available.

• Rainbow Brush: Brilliant photo manipulation app,  it lets you quickly and easily give photos a dramatic look by converting them to black and white, while keeping your chosen details in color. This effect draws the viewer’s attention to the colored areas, creating striking images. You simply use your finger as a brush to remove or bring back the original color from regions of your image. You can zoom in or out to ensure your get the right finish. Highly recommended.

• FlickrUp: A great tool to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr, you can create photosets, define the resolution, set privacy settings in addition to adding tags and descriptions. Has a pretty UI as well.

• Mes Input: An app that lets you add different keyboard to the N9. Like with Swype, you can swipe from the edge to switch between them. For example, I have a keyboard which gives me quick access to smileys, similarly there are a bunch of other options available. You can even create your own keyboard at www.mesinput.com and use this app to install it on the phone.

• Resource Monitor: As the name suggests, this app lets you keep track of the resources that are being used on your device. You can switch between different views that show RAM, Storage and Processes.

• Date Event: The N9′s events screen shows news, Facebook and twitter streams, but it does not show your upcoming calendar entries and that’s where this app comes in. It displays upcoming entries on the events screen and lets you choose which calendar to pull them from. You can also select the number of days it should show entries from. It is still being developed and isn’t in the Nokia Store, get it here directly .

• 3D World Gaze: Cool app for exploring the world around you, built with the premise that the Earth is a giant sphere and we are always on top of it. What follows is that far-away continents and cities are in reality somewhere below you and not linear, like we usually think of them. Detailed write up and video demo here.

So these were my top 20 free apps for the N9/N950. I’m sure I’ve missed out on quite a few other awesome apps, please let me know in the comments section or on Twitter and I’ll do a follow up post!

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Windows Phone’s Metro UI is all about tiles and lists and because of this philosophy, the ability to puts folders on the Windows Phone homescreen is missing. So even if you just want a quick shortcut to a favourite app, you’ll have to pin it as a full size tile. However, Microsoft recently embraced the open spirit and let users deploy homebrew code if they so chose by unlocking their device via the ChevronWP7 labs and that has put the following hack into everyone’s hands.

The folder resembles a tile and shows you a preview of the apps that are inside, tap on it and it will present a list of the app in that folder. If there are more apps inside the folder than can be shown on the tile in one go, then it keeps flipping over to show you the others, copying the behavior of other ‘live tiles’ that may reside on your homescreen.

Features:

• Create unlimited folders to pin to your start screen
• Completely custom groupings (not restricted by categories of any sort)
• Add Marketplace, homebrew, built-in applications, and websites to a folder
• Automatic Marketplace look up
• Automatic homebrew XAP parsing
• Shortcuts to WiFi, Bluetooth, Flight mode, and cellular settings
• Fully customizable with the ability to manually edit application entries
• Folders. Something other Windows Phones don’t have. Gotta love homebrew, no?

If this is something you’d like to implement on your phone, the guys at Windows Phone Hacker have a full tutorial along with a complete video how to. You just need a developer/Chevron unlocked Windows Phone running Mango.

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The Nokia Lumia 800 ships with Windows Phone Mango, and therefore has the best mobile Office client there is. It lets you create and edit both Word documents and Excel sheets, and even has a few templates to get you started. You can also view  Powerpoint presentations, but what I like the most is the One Note integration. It lets you add voice notes, text and pictures in one go and automatically syncs to your Sky Drive account so you have access to your notes from anywhere in the world, seamlessly.

Also, all the smooth Windows Phone transitions make the Office client surprisingly good to look at, in turn making the thought of editing work documents on the go, almost appealing. So much so that I was ready to do just that, on a boat!

These one minute videos are part of Nokia’s Lumia 800 Uncovered series, looking at some of the Lumia 800 and Nokia Windows Phones’ features in general. They make for a fun watch, so I recommend you keep an eye on the official Nokia YouTube channel, there’s already videos about Nokia Drive and the Camera there, and I know for a fact that there are more to come.

But for some reason if one minute videos aren’t your style, there’s always my 15 minute look at the Lumia 800.

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Swype is something I absolutely love, so I was pretty disappointed when it didn’t ship with the N9, specially when we’d seen early demos of it working on the N9. But better late than never, the PR 1.1 firmware started rolling out for the N9 today and with it Swype makes a debut on the N9, and its worth the wait.

It isn’t activated out of the box, so you need to goto Settings> Time and Language> Text Input and enable it first. Then you can swipe away the default N9 keyboard and switch to swype (all of this is demoed in the video below).

As you can see, the keys are nicely spaced out furthering Swype’s goal to be both a ‘Swype’ keyboard and a good thumb type board at the same it. There’s inbuilt auto correction, word prediction and a bunch of other options. We go through everything in the video below.

(Available in HD)

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Developers have blessed the Nokia N9 with a bunch of very good internet radio apps in the past, but there’s nothing like getting an Internet Radio app directly from Nokia. So if you head over to the Nokia Store on the N9 and search for ‘Internet Radio’ (direct store link) you’ll be presented with the free download, which to no surprise of ours is an excellent iteration.

Once installed, curiously the app is called ‘IP Radio’. The UI is similar to the default music player with album art being replaced by cover art for the featured radio stations. This is followed by a ‘Hot Picks’ tab, Locations, Language and Genre. Needless to say, you sort a ton of pre-loaded stations by region, language or genre, and this makes discovery a real breeze.

If you like a station you’ve listened to, you can favourite it for quick retrieval. You can also search for more stations and finally tapping that man in the bottom right corner takes you to your history, neat. I’ve been playing with the app for a little while and it feels very polished.  I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending that you download it, just watch your data connection!

In case you have any problems downloading, you can use this method to download the .deb to your desktop and try side loading the app.

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Nokia 3D World Gaze is a pretty cool app built with the premise that the Earth is a giant sphere and we are always on top of it. What follows is that far-away continents and cities are in reality somewhere below you and not linear, like we usually think of them.

So how it works is that you simply point your phone in a direction and it lets you see through the surface (and insides) of the planet all the way to the other side. You can use it to explore your immediate surroundings or fly to any part of the world. In addition to geographical features such as continents in their real physical locations, Nokia 3D World Gaze allows you to see geotagged media, day and night regions, current location of the Sun, and other content from locations around the world.

So while looking at an area of the world, you can tap the pictures button to see pictures from that region or the latest news. The N9 version even features Wikitravel searches based on city name. Have a look at the demo to see how it actually works.

The application has just become available for the Nokia N9 on Nokia’s Beta Labs and has been available for Symbian devices for a sort while now. Try it here.

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While Nokia’s Drive app will be exclusive to its Windows Phones, the Nokia Maps application will be available on the Windows Phone marketplace for all Windows Phone devices. The application is a little different from what you are used to on Symbian devices and follows the Metro style UI.

Another difference is you cannot pre-load maps on this application, that is restricted to Nokia Drive. So you will need an active data connection to pull the maps and other location information around you. But once your get that out of the way, the experience on the app is very good. You can pinch to zoom, have access to all sorts of guides with Lonely Planet and Michelin integration, similar to the Symbian counterpart. Another aspect that has been really improved is public transport.

In certain regions around the world, Nokia will be offering tracking of public transport accurate upto the minute.  The first view lets you search for places nearby, while the second view populates the map with the top 25 restaurants, shops, vistor attractions around you to give you a better idea of how to get around a new city.

Here is a in depth look at the application. Unfortunately the video was recorded in a noisy room, but the video should still give you a fair idea of what to expect from the Windows Phone variant of Nokia Maps.

Many thanks to Dan Martins from the Nokia Maps team for the demo.

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At Nokia World, Nokia introduced a brand new social location service called ‘Nokia Pulse‘ that aims at helping you answer the “where are you?”, “how do I get there?”, “where should we meet?” questions that keep popping up in real life.

(Watch in HD)

“So, how does it work exactly? Imagine, you have just arrived at the airport. What do you typically do? Call/SMS someone close, say from your family to coordinate a pickup. Several SMS/calls are exchanged before the pickup happens successfully. With Nokia Pulse, all you need to do is type “Here!”or simply check-in and an instant notification of your update is sent to everyone in your family group tagged with your current location. You receive a response, “On my way” with a location tagged that shows you exactly where you ride is on the map. In addition, Nokia Pulse allows you to discover and post nearby places with recommendations, ratings, directions and even direct access to a phone number for a quick phone call. So while you wait, you can enjoy your favorite coffee at a nearby Café and inform your ride where you are with just one tap.”

So basically everyone in your group get to know where you are so that you can coordinate meetings, pick ups etc better, your contacts can even comment on checkins. It is also much more fun, and a seamless way of doing things. The applications is in beta and is available for Symbian, Windows phone and you can even access it from any other phone by going to m.pulse.nokia.com and at pulse.nokia.com from any browser on the desktop.

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The mapping division of Nokia has been on a roll these past few months continuously working on making the whole experience much better on Nokia devices. But that hasn’t stopped them from further improving on the HTML5 version of Nokia Maps that was launched for iOS and Android.

Infact, its progressed by leaps and bounds, a far cry from the somewhat limited experience it offered a few months ago. The new version of Nokia Maps mobile accesible at m.maps.nokia.com brings offline mapping to your navigation experience, and lets you download maps of your local area over WIFI before heading out to save on data costs.

Next, in addition to walking and driving directions, it now also offers public transport directions as well. A very welcome functionality indeed.

That’s not all, now it also offers guides and information about your location, along with a points of interest (POI) database that shows nearby venues for shopping, entertainment, food and so on, bringing the Nokia Maps experience on Android and iOS fairly close to the standalone version available on Symbian and the MeeGo Harmattan powered Nokia N9.

The Nokia Maps mobile experience on the iPad is very good because of the better HTML5 support, the larger screen and it to my mind it can give the inbuilt Google Maps app a real run for its money. Maps is one of Nokia’s core strengths and its been improving all the time, if you want evidence, I recommend you check out the HTML5 version of Nokia Maps on m.maps.nokia.com from your iOS or Android devices.

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A brand new foursquare client based in Qt has just gone live on the Nokia Store and I highly recommend you download it. Its a major improvement over the existing client, complete with photo uploads, notifications, comments, listing venues on maps and so on. It looks great and feels fast.

Search for ‘foursquare’ on the Nokia Store and you should see the client, its still called ‘Foursquare for Symbian’. It might not be as smooth in its operation as 4squick is, but its free.

Hat tip to @Camb078 for the find!

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Here’s some more good news for prospective N9 owners, the popular Sports Tracker app is also coming to MeeGo and the Nokia N9. While the app is expected to be released in November, the developers have already shared a few screenshots of what it looks like, and I have to say it’ll be one of the better looking apps on the N9.

The Sports Tracker app on the N9 will feature all the tracking capabilities you’ve come to expect from Sports Tracker and also support for the new Sports Tracker Heart Rate Monitor. It you’re keen on keep up with the developers, you can follow them on  Twitter and Facebook.

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The popular is video playback tool VLC is coming to the Nokia N9, and if you’re willing to use beta pre-release software, then its here already. The app is still in the early phase of development, but if you’re itching to play that seemingly unsupported codec on your shiny N9 or N950, then there’s hope.

However, there are a few known issues like the fact that the UI is isn’t optmised for the phone, so its tedious work. Hardware-accelerated video decoding is not supported (however, color space conversion and scaling are hardware-accelerated). So its best not to throw those HD videos at it yet.

If you’re feeling courageous, head over to this page and you’ll find all the instructions you need to download and install the app.

Hat tip to @nsuffys for the find.

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Nokia India recently had an event about its latest NFC devices like the Nokia 701, 700 and the 600, all of which run Symbian Belle. Since a bunch of us were together, we decided to get in front of the camera and demo some of the NFC functionality that’s ready to be used by the consumers.

We demo Angry Birds Magic, the game that lets you unlock levels using NFC, NFC pairing, transferring photos using NFC and using NFC tags amongst other things. We wrap the video up by talking about the future of NFC apps.

In case you are wondering, the people in the video are me (@v4ibhav), Clinton Jeff (@clintonjeff), Vikas (@tsuvik) and Nikhil Pai (@NikhilPai).

So what do you think does NFC hold for us in the future. Let us know!

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Nokia Conversations has just let word slip that the Nokia N9 is now well and truly on its way to consumers around the world at an unsubsidized price of EUR 480 for the 16GB and EUR 560 for the 64 GB variant. Sadly there are no specifics about which countries are getting the device, so you will still need to visit your local stores to find out.

The only thing that’s certain is that the N9 will soon start popping up in the wild and you will start seeing more and more unboxing videos. Nokia had opened pre-orders in certain countries a couple of weeks back and consumer demand seemed to have been huge, with the Finnish pre-orders threatening to exceed the supply.

In another post, Nokia while promising future software support for the device states that ‘The first updates will be based on feedback received from operators and consumers and they make the device even more intuitive than before. The availability and content of the updates will be communicated closer to the download start‘.

While it seems the N9 will not be coming to a lot of the major markets around the world,  you should be able to import the device from other markets very soon. With Nokia World and the first Nokia Windows Phones under a month away, are you considering getting the N9?

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If there is one app that makes a huge difference in the usability of touchscreen phones, its Swype, the input method that lets you swype words in, instead of having to resort to the the slower traditional pecking method. The brand new version of Swype 2.0 is now available for Symbian devices at the Nokia Beta Labs.

The update is available for older Symbian 5th Edition devices, Symbian^3 users who haven’t updates to Anna yet and Anna users. There is no special build for Symbian Belle yet, but I’m glad to inform you that the Symbian Anna version seems to work just fine on my N8 running Belle. Infact, the screenshot on the side was taken on that same device.

The Swype 2.0 update brings:

• Portrait and split-screen support for devices with Symbian Anna
• Cutting-edge predictive tap auto-correction engine
• 30 downloadable language dictionaries
• Many incremental UX changes based on Nokia and Android Beta Labs feedback
• Hundreds of bug fixes.

You can head over to this page and download it for yourself, if you have Swype from the Ovi Store installed, its best to uninstall that version before updating to the beta.

Get Swyping!

PS: With Nokia being a shareholder in Swype, I hope they are working on a Windows phone version as well.

[Update] Official Nokia Beta Labs post is here.

[via: ZOMG Its Cj, ST]

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After neglecting to even have a mobile optimised website for ages, India’s biggest multiplex chain PVR Cinemas has finally gotten around to releasing an app to make lives of its customers much easier. As you would expect, both Android and iOS users are the first to receive the app and it seems Symbian and Windows Phone users are out of luck for now.

The free apps are available from Apple’s App Store (optimised for both iPhone and iPad) and the Android Market. The app lets you perform all the actions you would expect including booking tickets, checking show listings and showing previews of upcoming releases.

You need to enter your email address and phone number the first time you launch the app, after which it sends you a confirmation code which you can enter to start using the app. It automatically finds your location and selects the appropriate city.

While booking tickets you can select your seats and choose to pay via a credit card or opt to collect the tickets one hour prior to the show.

[via: Twitter]

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The one key app that was missing from the Windows Phone repertoire was the ever popular cross platform messaging client WhatsApp. WhatsApp is already available on BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian and Android based devices and packs in the ability to share photos, location, video and audio.

Earlier today, the official @WhatsApp twitter account sent out the above cryptic tweet that all but confirms that the application will soon be making its way onto Windows Phone Mango.

The Mango release of Windows Phone unlocks the necessary developer APIs required for WhatApp to work and judging by the tweet, the official launch cannot be very far. Nokia for one has been investing a huge amount of money promoting WhatApp and it would have been odd if its newer (Windows) phones didn’t support that application.

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One of Nokia Maps’ biggest strengths is its ability to pre-load maps. Once you know where you’re headed, you can download the maps for that city/country over the air or via your computer for free before you leave and you’ll never be in a situation where you’re lost, just because your phone can’t pull the maps via the internet connection.

Needless to say its also useful even if you have speedy data as you save on data costs and no matter how fast your connection, it’ll never beat local storage. Someone decided to put together a fun video just to show this, the real action starts a few seconds in.

It may be pertinent to note that Google Maps on Android can now pre-cache maps in 10 mile blocks, useful, but that still doesn’t let use you those maps for navigation. Google Maps may be the leader in search, POIs, and public transport directions, but there’s nothing to beat Nokia Maps’ navigation and zero online dependency.

Hat tip to ZCJ for the find.

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