Nokia Unveils a Maps Service

<i>a Maps Service that Lives in the Cloud</i><p>What does that mean? Honestly, I do not understand it. Name-dropping the "cloud"? Is that meant to be negative or positive? Any big map service is bound to run on multiple redundant machines, isn't that the cloud?<p>Seeing <a href="http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img/shots/around-here.png" rel="nofollow">http://static.here.sc/maps/39568/core/features/intropage/img...</a> I cringe. Measuring distances like that does not work in the field, you can almost never walk in a straight line. Distances must be calculated by appropiate means of travel, eg streets for cars/bicycles or ways and walkable areas for pedestrians. Somewhere at Nokia a team of cartographers must be sobbing into their glasses of beer.<p>Looking at random places I know, I can debunk their claim of "Most accurate map". OpenStreetMap is more accurate at those. (Anecdote!)<p>This leads to my next critic. They want people fix/enhance the map data for them. But then it is NOT <i>shared</i> back, only as map image. The data stays with Nokia and you probably cannot even export your own contributions. Same as Google really.<p>Adding "social" to a map service is a great idea. I was always wondering why none of the big players did that.<p>The 3D stuff is amazing.

Nice little experience as an Opera user when enabling the 3D view. It recognised my browser and explained quite simply how to enable WebGL. (Go to opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebGL and set the value to 1).<p>I think other websites could learn something from this, instead of thrusting a link to 'upgrade' my browser to chrome or safari or flat out failing.

Their street view is horrendously low quality. Would have thought that if you were going to go to the effort of mapping out streets (quite extensively too), you'd use high definition cameras.

The aerial data for my location are at least 8 years old and very low quality. It's interesting to see so back into history but not really useful.<p>edit: comparing it to other sources, it seems like it's from 2003

Literally every single business (34 of them) within a quarter mile or so radius of my home is wrong. Either closed, grossly in the wrong place, or never existed in the first place.

Really impressed by the fluent 3D view and the exploration mode for some cities. Good job Nokia!

None of the map tiles are retina-optimized, it looks terribly blurry on my iPhone. Also it doesn't try to autocomplete addresses as I type them in, I find that super helpful on all other map apps. Absolutely nothing makes me want to use this again.

Didn't realize this was posted higher than the other one. Anyhoo, I was initially unimpressed because I zoomed into Paris and the 3D view didn't work very well, but I discovered Toronto.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ldgtc.jpg</a><p>And you can view it yourself here: <a href="http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day" rel="nofollow">http://here.net/43.6461465,-79.3878013,15.9,349,72,3d.day</a><p>Very visually impressive and doubly so that it runs in my browser without any extra plugins and at such a smooth level.

I'm impressed by how good the 3D view looks. Good to see that a company that is struggling is still trying to innovate.

Related article by TechnologyReview <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-map-service-that-lives-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507186/nokia-unveils-a-...</a>

Anybody managed to get an API key for this service ? Seems that <a href="http://developer.here.net/myapps" rel="nofollow">http://developer.here.net/myapps</a> (which is linked elsewhere in the site and looks like the url for a developer dashboard) is broken (even when you're signed in or at least trying to sign in with a legit nokia developer account).

Routing in the UK is much better on here.net than in Apple iOS6 Maps. Will Nokia release the iOS app?

Vancouver satellite imagery is over three years old. Geolocation by Canadian postal code less accurate than Google or Bing.<p>Though points for detecting my browser and telling me how to enable WebGL for the 3D functionality, and Toronto 3D is pretty good.

Awkward 3 or 4 different interfaces with different ways to transition between them in each one. Links that go nowhere / don't really work / leave UI that doesn't move when you zoom. A decent effort, but less finished than even Apple's result.

The 3d view is pretty impressive, although opening the webinspector crashed my Mac :(

I just tried 2 searches. My current address, and my current city. Both failed. Google maps handles them no problem. They could have the best data and nicest maps, but if their search sucks, what's the point?

Not sure what all the comments about the "amazing 3D" are about. Apple's 3D maps implementation is infinitely better (not that 3D maps are in the slightest bit useful...)

The collision detection on the 3D view is strange. When you hit an object, the zoom level is decreased until you clear the object (in this case the top of a building).

satellite image quality outside of major cities seems way better than on google maps, at least for some of the places in Ireland that I tried, i.e.<p>Here: <a href="http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day" rel="nofollow">http://here.net/53.3395769,-6.5376296,18,0,0,hybrid.day</a><p>Google maps: <a href="http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/maps/V55lW</a><p>Edit: fixed google maps url

The tilted 3D view has the same sort of skewing that Apple's new maps app has. Anyone know what it might be about the algorithms that make them do that?

Why are they rerouting here.com to here.net? Why use the .net if you have the .com?

Whoa, trees are modeled in 3D.

Central Tokyo has about as much information as central Pyongyang.

ran into an odd bug right off the bat - "directions" generates a proper turn-by-turn list of directions, but the map pane goes blank rather than displaying the route.

What an abysmal name. Most of the time you use a web-based map and at least half the time you use a mobile map, you are not looking at "here" but where you want to go.