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Navigation

Discover and explore your surroundings with Nokia Maps as your companion. Search and find addresses and local points of interest, then upgrade to voice-guided car and turn-by-turn pedestrian navigation for even more convenience and guidance.

One of the features that can be best lauded is the GPS capabilities of the Nokia N96. The navigation system is really quite the same as the navigation on most Nokia phones, where the voice will either tell you to turn left or right. And that is where the similarities end. Personally, I own a Nokia N95 8GB, and have found that the Nokia N96 beats it flat in terms of speed of determining its own location. You don’t have to find an open space in the field so that the phone can capture signals from the satellites to determine your position. I can be sitting in my own room, and the GPS is able to detect my location in a matter of seconds!! This, to me, is really quite convenient. With such capabilities, I would not have to stand idly for 15 minutes before my phone’s GPS can get enough signals to calculate where I’m standing.

From: Chiep Ping
Navigation from point to point is great. The navigator will alert the driver to turn around 10 metres before he reaches the junction. As for the pedestrian navigator, make sure you don’t go through a building as GPS signal will be weak. Do not believe the navigator too much as it may not necessarily show you the shortest path.

From: Chun Hui
Display and layout of maps (if you are familiar with Maps 2.0) has not changed; the same can be said of the upgradeable voice-guided navigation. Synchronisation with the GPS satellite seems to be markedly improved over the N95 8GB, with a connection secured within a minute. Although, while walking on the road outside my home, I discovered that the display of house numbers did not really correspond. Example: I started walking from one end of the street and the display on-screen indicated I was near house 182, when there was no such address within the vicinity!

From: Darren Kong
GPS signal detection was really fast. It took only slightly more than a minute to show my location. It is one of the fastest and did I mention I was just standing near to the window and not out under the open sky? Okay, the A-GPS might have helped but I do not remember it being ever that fast in the previous phones. I enjoyed the satellite view, and the location search was fast too.

From: Frank Foo
Nokia Maps just got more usable with the Nokia N96. Introduced little more than a year ago with the Nokia N95, the Nokia N96 ups the ante with faster-loading maps for real-life usability. I don’t drive a car, but using Nokia Maps while I was navigating around town was a thrill. Next up – tracking my weekly runs with the Nokia N96 (after I get my hands on one)!

From: Jeffery Yeo
I thought that finding one’s location on Nokia Maps was quite slow. However, once the phone has picked up the location, I found it to be quite accurate. Using the GPS while driving helped me find some really “ulu” locations that I’ve never gone to before. However, maybe Nokia would like to improve on Nokia Maps by indicating HDB block numbers. The battery got used up quite fast, but I think it’s very nice for Nokia to provide a car charger instead of asking us to buy one. One thing I don’t like about the navigation feature is the Nokia Maps license. Why is it that it only comes free for 3 months? Also, I noticed that for us to get on the GPS we have to log on to 3G, which most likely will incur charges (not sure on that though). I will have to wait for my next mobile bill before I can complain about how this GPS increased my bill.

From: John Low
It’s nice that Nokia has been progressively beefing up Nokia Maps since the Nokia N95 days, with better features and faster performance. Not to mention, I’m now pleasantly surprised to find that the new Nokia N96 is able to locate my position in under a minute, thus I can start navigating around sooner than before, sweet! Nokia Maps is still as dependable and user-friendly to guide me to my saved landmarks and routes, search addresses & places, but the extras like city-guides & voice-guided navigation still costs $ though… =P

From: Sean Lau
The bundled map software is easy to use but it will be nice to have more specific details such as the apartment block numbers. Nevertheless, the turn-by-turn voice instructions are clear and concise and it got me to my destinations fairly quickly.

From: Vincent Chan
GPS with Nokia Maps works great in the outdoors when driving or even walking to unfamiliar locations. I was able to know where I was, and find ways to reach my destinations. However, the time in determining my position was quite slow at the first startup.

From: Yu Xiang
It was fun using the Nokia Maps on my bus ride. I was surprised that I can actually use my 2G SIM card to operate the Assisted GPS on the Nokia Maps application. The A-GPS was responsive, the correct map laid out accurate roads and the GPS accurately updated my position throughout my entire bus route to the HWZ office. Now, if only there were more building icons cluttered on my maps. No more excuses for me to get lost again since I can follow an online “live” street directory on the Nokia N96.

From: Ng Yee Tat
I must say, this has been a largely underutilized application under my charge, though the turn-by-turn GPS navigation system seems more wieldy than my previous handheld. More often not, directions were timely and fairly accurate. No more feeling like I’m caught in the twilight zone with Marvin the Paranoid Android!

From: Ian
The Nokia map was accurate in pinpointing where I was and provided me with the shorter route to reach my destination.

From: Eric
I fell in love with Nokia Maps and A-GPS, which I feel are the greatest features which make Nokia N96 such a big deal. I’ve long been wanting to try out Nokia Maps and maybe even develop something for it by tapping into the API available for developers.

I must praise the Nokia Maps and the A-GPS technologies which I believe greatly enhance the mobility of individuals. It refreshes the current location of your whereabouts with the server constantly although this causes the application to be a little laggy. But I would overlook that for accuracy. People who are driving or walking within close proximity would love to have Nokia Maps with them to direct them to their destinations, especially when it’s connected instantly and updated every now and then to reflect your actual and current locations and the viable ways to reach your destinations.

From: Jenson
The GPS unfortunately let me down. It took a really long time to detect my location, and even then it was not accurate as to where I was. There was a lot of lag time for it to update position and it was also not user-friendly.

From: Marcus Lin
Never get lost again! The preloaded Nokia Maps GPS navigation program, with built-in A-GPS, offers maps with urban details and satellite views and is upgradable to City Guides, turn-by-turn pedestrian mode and voice-guided car navigation. Explore your surroundings and search for places of interests in just one touch.

From: Donald Jiang
The basic function of navigation is just like my standalone GPS device. I did not upgrade to voice-guided car navigation due to the short trial time.

From: Joseph Teo
I have been using a dedicated GPS device while driving and thus was quite surprised that the Nokia N96 displayed the same ease of use and accuracy. It should be a handy device for those self-drive holiday trips.

From: Donald Owng
The N96 includes Nokia’s new Maps 2.0 application, which adds a new pedestrian mode, improved mapping and satellite imagery to the mix, along with improved city guides. Being Singapore, Singapore roads and landmarks changes so often but it got me to where I wanted.

From: Jerry Lee
Unfortunately, my trial handset’s drive-to voice guided navigation 3 month trial period had already expired, but past experiences with Nokia Maps 2.0 (Nokia 6210 Navigator) voice guided navigation and they’ve been nothing but pleasant. There should be no exception here, seeing that it’s the same software that’s used in the Nokia N96. Triangulating my location is typically speedy, on average taking under a minute when not under cover.

From: Nicholas Goh
It took an average of 45 seconds to 1 minute for the GPS to determine my location, which is decent but nothing to rave about. The maps are detailed and handy to have in lieu of a street directory. I can see this feature being very useful for drivers but pedestrians should utilize it too.

From: Faith Y
GPS functionality on a mobile phone is great but locking onto the satellites takes some time with A-GPS turned off. The software also could not rotate to reflect the direction in which I was moving, but only showed a general ’south to north’ direction.

I chose to turn off the A-GPS so as not to incur additional GPRS charges that I’ve already incurred so far. I do not like the fact that the navigation function needed a subscription to run. Why should anyone pay to use navigation when the service is free to start with? I did not use the navigation on the phone because of this, but I only used it as a map to show my location.

From: Matthew Seeto