Travel Gadget: my MAPS and my GPS

Currently I am juggling between 2 mobile phones. Both have different purposes and I am keeping it that way.

The Blackberry is for work calls and work emails. This phone is strictly for work. There are only 2 people who knows this number outside work and that is the Dutchman and my mom.

The Nokia Mini is my personal phone. I call here. I SMS here. I Facebook here. I internet here. Maybe I should try blogging here soon too. But most importantly, I use the OVI Maps and GPS here—this is actually the functionality that made me buy this phone. Being a travel addict, I need my MAPS and my GPS.

The dosage I get:

Free Drive Navigation Worldwide
Free Walk Navigation Worldwide
Free Maps and Maps Update (any city and country in the world)
Free Events guides
Free Lonely Planet guide (very basic)
Free Michelin guide

So in preparation for our upcoming holiday, today Dutchman and I downloaded the California, USA map. Just a few more nights and we are off! We also downloaded the Jordan map for my trip in April with Blondine, as well as the Philippine map for future use. There was also an automatic update for Europe map which is what I badly need seeing that the highways in the Netherlands have been recently upgraded. The A2 highway for example is now unrecognizable!

Nevertheless, what I wanted to say is, I am not a tech geek but I am very happy that I have Nokia OVI Maps in my phone. The software is free to download and GPS is of course free to use worldwide. No additional costs.

Recently, Nokia revamped its go to market strategy by teaming up with Microsoft. Several doomsday analysts thought it’s the worst team up ever, a marriage that is bound to fail? Nokia has been losing market shares to iPhone and Blackberry while Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS barely has a 3% market share. How can 2 losing companies become successful in this highly competitive mobile communications market?

I have no idea, but for now, I am sticking with Nokia because of the OVI Maps and GPS.