Nokia Trying To Gain Dominance In Navigation Services

One of the most common complaints about the recently released iOS 6 is that the new Apple Maps service is well below acceptable standards and shows frequent errors. One of Apple’s rivals, Finnish smartphone manufacturer Nokia, seems to be trying to exploit the situation to its advantage by poking fun of the glitches in Apple’s Maps application while at the same time highlighting the superiority of its own navigation service. Nokia had previously bought Navteq, a maps provider based in Chicago, for $8.1 billion in 2008 and has constantly improved the service over the years with a number of innovative additions. In fact, Nokia’s mapping services are miles
ahead of competing services on both iOS as well as Android.

Nokia has lost a lot of customers to both the iPhone and Android devices over the last few years and is now poking fun of Apple over social media and through blog posts. Nokia is confident that the criticism Apple has received for its Maps service will definitely highlight the superior features in its own service that came as a result of well thought out investments over the last couple of years. It appears that the perception about navigation services has moved on from mere competition about which platform can provide the service to the actual quality of the services provided. The definite advantage Nokia has in this respect is its ownership of mapping software and data as opposed to Apple which until now licensed the service from Google and from iOS 6 onwards, licenses location data from TomTom NV and OpenStreetMap.

The Finnish manufacturer has reported losses over five consecutive quarters and promoting the maps service seems to be one of the company’s main driving points to push sales up. Pre sale advertising focuses heavily on the navigation and maps features that are based on Nokia’s in- house maps. In addition, the company is building a business out of its maps services by selling it to Amazon, Yahoo, Mercedes-Benz and Nikon.

As Nokia tries to develop its maps service into a fully fledged navigation business, it is definitely going to face competition from Google which has tried to establish itself as the dominant player in the industry. It will be interesting to see the strategies that each company will use against the other to try and upstage the other in the battle for the smartphone market.