The mobile web version of Nokia Maps now looks and behaves more like a standard native application on Google Android and Apple iOS devices, thanks to HTML5: The navigation service now provides offline downloading of maps. This ability can reduce mobile broadband data charges or allow map usage in areas that have limited or no wireless data service.

Enthusiast site Android Community noted the updates on Monday by way of the HandHeld Blog. In addition to the downloadable maps, the service — found at http://m.maps.nokia.com — also adds public transit directions to supplement the existing walking and driving navigation as well as points of interest (POI) and guides to the local area.

Nokia’s mapping service is arguably one of the best software products to come from the Finland-based handset maker, and this update makes it even better. Why else would Microsoft decide to integrate Nokia Maps in the Windows Phone platform going forward? I used the web version of Nokia Maps earlier on Monday, finding it to be so full-featured that it was almost difficult to believe it to be a web application.

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The offline mapping mode is welcome, especially when many smartphone owners pay for set amounts of wireless data. Google, too, recently introduced downloadable maps, partially for this reason. Nokia’s implementation is somewhat limiting, though, at least in my short tests. The initial geographic area I wanted to map was too large, so Nokia Maps wouldn’t save it. I had to keep zooming and cropping before saving.

The end result was a reasonable size — about 15 square blocks of Philadelphia — and I had to boost the storage limits allocated to the service to get the 19 MB area map downloaded. Nokia calls these “neighborhood maps,” so if you’re planning to visit several areas, each neighborhood will have to be downloaded separately. That differs from Google’s solution, where I was able to grab a map of 10 square miles. Once you have a local map from Nokia stored on the device, you don’t have access to the guides and POIs, but you can zoom in for greater detail, just like Google’s version.

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Say goodbye to Android as you know it. Ice Cream Sandwich (otherwise known as Android 4.0) is coming, and it’s the biggest upgrade Android has seen to date.

But fancy new software isn’t the only thing Google’s been working on: they’ve also just announced their new flagship Android device, the Samsung-made Galaxy Nexus. I got to spend a solid chunk of time with both the new hardware and the new software, and have returned with a venerable mountain of first impressions, insight, and the best damned demo video you’ll find anywhere.

The Demo Video:

The Hardware

As an army of now-unemployed webOS employees could tell you: without good hardware, good software is nothing.

Fortunately, the Galaxy Nexus is — at least from what we’ve seen so far — good hardware. Really good. As in, quite possibly the best looking piece Samsung has ever built. Take the resoundingly solid design of the Galaxy S II, add the subtle curve of the Nexus S’ display, throw in some svelte curves for good measure — Ta-da! You have the Galaxy Nexus.

Appearing from the side as something not unlike a teardrop, the Galaxy Nexus tapers from above down into an ever-so-slightly thicker base. Unlike the “hump” found on the rump of the Motorola Droid X (or even the just announced Droid RAZR), however, Google tells me that the deeper base is designed as such for sake of ergonomics, rather than as a store-all for the device’s thickest components. Also unlike the Droid X, the Galaxy Nexus’ wider bit doesn’t detract from the device’s overall look.

There was one bit of the body that I wasn’t a fan of, though: the battery cover. Like many a Samsung before it, the Galaxy Nexus’ battery cover is made up of a chintzy-feeling plastic. You wouldn’t notice until you pulled the cover off… but once you do, it just sort of sticks with you. My opinion may be swayed a bit after having seen the exceedingly slick Kevlar rear of the Droid RAZR this morning — though arguably, the RAZR’s rear panel isn’t removable.

Samsung has been improving their Super AMOLED series of displays at a breakneck pace, and they didn’t ease off the gas for this one. With an HD resolution of 1280×720 (a first in the mobile world) and coming in at a mindblogging 4.65″, I couldn’t help but wonder: would the screen be too big?

The answer is no. In most cases, it felt no larger than the now relatively commonplace 4.5″ screen. Why? It’s all about the buttons. Where previous devices might’ve put their capacitive hardware keys, the Galaxy Nexus puts more display. The buttons become a part of the screen itself, allowing the screen to appear to be a more comfortable 4.5″-or-so during regular use, expanding out to 4.65″ (by hiding the onscreen buttons) only when it’s most beneficial to the experience (like during video playback.) This on-screen button trickery is an optional offering of Ice Cream Sandwich, so expect other manufacturers to pick it up stat.

Though I didn’t manage to finagle a sample shot to offer up as evidence, the quality of the device’s front and rear camera seemed about average. I tested the device in a relatively low-light room, and I was neither harshly disappointed nor overwhelmingly impressed.

The Software (Android 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich)

Ice Cream Sandwich is Android as it should be.

It’s the first time I’ve used Android and felt that Google has stepped anywhere near that truly fine balance between power, flexibility, usability, and good ol’ fashion beauty. Android has always been powerful — it just never really looked all that good doing it. Ice Cream Sandwich looks good. Really good.

Oddly, I never liked Honeycomb, the tablet-only predecessor from which Ice Cream Sandwich takes so many visual cues. Both Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich share a generally dark motif. Stretched out across a tablet’s display, that darkness can come across as a depressing, empty void. On the smaller display (as weird as it is to classify a 4.65″ display as “smaller”) of a smartphone, however, it’s sharp. I’m also a sucker for symmetry, and the center-aligned icons of ICS on a phone (as opposed to the side-aligned icons on a Honeycomb tablet) just look better.

Ice Cream Sandwich’s Finer Features:

The widgets system has been overhauled, with the primary new trick being resizability. The Gmail widget, for example, can be scaled to show just two recent e-mails at a time, or, with a brief hold of the widget and a quick drag of the edge markers, up to three or four.
You can, at long last, take screenshots right on the device. Outside of a few phones which had screenshot functionality hacked in by the manufacturers, nabbing a screen grab on Android generally entailed installing a massive SDK onto your computer and learning your way around the tools.
The browser has been thoroughly improved. It’s got the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements, but also now allows you to save pages for offline reading and to request the non-mobile version of any page with just one click (presumably through a bit of user-agent trickery).
The new camera is really, really fast. Shutter lag is non-existant, and it’s ready to take another picture in well under a second. I’m itching to do a quick-draw shoot out between the camera on the Galaxy Nexus and that of the iPhone 4S.
The speech-to-text engine has been completely overhauled, and is remarkably fast. You speak naturally, and the streaming speech-to-text conversion should only lag behind your words by a few syllables. You’ve gotta see it to believe it (check it out in the video above at the 2:31 mark).
Also well worth seeing (9:25 in the video above): the Face Recognition Lock. Android takes a few seconds to analyze the structure of your face — once configured, your mug is the only one that the device will unlock for. In low light situations (wherein the camera might not be able to see you well enough) you can fall back to a swipe pattern (which ICS requires you set up while configuring the face detection).
To create a folder, you now simply drag one app on-top of another. Apps can also now be dragged in and out of the static dock area without trudging through settings.
They’ve tucked in a rather talented photo editing tool, with everything from scaling/cropping to basic photo filters. It’s no Photoshop, but it’ll probably hold you over until Instagram makes its way to Android.
To geek out for a moment, there was one small bit that was perhaps my favorite of all: the data usage monitor. With the quick drag of a few sliders across a graph, you can quickly peruse a timeline of your data usage, and narrow down which apps are the data-gobbling culprits. One more bar lets you set up automatic warning triggers for your data usage, while a final bar lets you set a point (say, half a meg shy of your monthly cap) at which your data connectivity automatically offs itself. As someone who gets nailed for data overages pretty much each and every month, I love it.

Ice Cream Sandwich is pretty. It’s polished. It’s animated, and shiny, and jam-friggin’-packed with gradients and alpha translucencies.

What it’s not — at least not yet — is flawless. There was a crash here and there, and a tense moment or two when a slider just… wouldn’t.. work. Google was quick to note that the build I was seeing was a relatively old one — but even if it weren’t, they still have weeks to stomp out the lingering bugs for the initial release, and months before anyone really expects Ice Cream Sandwich to trickle out onto a wide array of devices. They’ll fix it up right.

This is the first time in a while I’ve been genuinely excited about Android from a software standpoint, and I look forward to seeing more of ICS in the future. We will, of course, give it a full review as the launch approaches, so be on the lookout for that






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Website:
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Launch Date:
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IPO:

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Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....






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A colleague of mine bought a $200 unlocked Android phone made by Acer. He's pairing it with an AT&T paygo plan using an automated purchase option that effectively costs him about $200-300 a year total for some voice and a modest amount of 3G data. Of course in many locations he's using WiFi.So his total two year smartphone cost is on the order of $700.A minimal iPhone plan, assuming purchase of the 4G without jailbreaking, would be perhaps $1,800 with all the fees and taxes of non-paygo plans.That's an $1,100 gap.The iPhone 4 (much less the 4S) is much better than his Acer phone - and iOS is mostly better than Android [1]. I'll count that as a $300 offset against that $1,100 gap.That leaves an $800 value gap and an $1,100 gross gap. This is not sustainable. Apple's brand isn't worth a value gap that large.I'm awfully glad Android is out there. As Android captures more of the geek market, and as the cost of Android data falls, there will be enormous pressure on the cost of iPhone plans.[1] However Calendar/Contact/document functionality with iOS 5/iCloud is much worse than Android/Google Apps.Update: Lots of great comments on this post. I hope I get to do a f/u post, but in the meantime ...Apple missed analyst expectations today... "Net income in the fiscal fourth quarter was $6.62 billion, or $7.05 per share ... Analysts ... were expecting $7.28 per share... iPhone sales were up 21 percent from last year at 17.1 million ... Analysts, however, were hoping for 20 million". There are lots of good reasons for this expectations gap, but it is consistent with price pressure.I'm only writing about the US. The US Apple Store doesn't yet sell an unlocked iPhone 4S, but it sells an unlocked iPhone 4 for $650. Unfortunately, it's not clear that US users can use it with a PayGo data plan, or even that AT&T officially allows it to be used as a voice-only phone. So using an unlocked iPhone might increase the price gap (unless you can live with T-mobile's limited service area.)It's easy to forget that in the US the purchase price of a phone is a fraction of the cost. The real basis is the costs of ownership over two years. That's why I don't compare unlocked phone purchase costs but compare phone and service. There are a lot of odd and disturbing rules about how and where iPhones can be used.I think the Acer phone is probably more like an bizarro 3GS than a 4, so I'm overstating the value gap by comparing it to a 4.Apple can obviously close the price gap significantly, but that will impact their margins and, eventually, their share price. The good news for families like mine (five iPhone devices) is that our costs are likely to fall. (It's good for us if Apple's stock price falls!)

Samsung and Google jointly delayed a U.S. press event last week that was expected to see both the next version of Android as well as the first phone to run it, dubbed the Nexus Prime. The actual name may vary based on which network operator carries it, but the Prime is anticipated to raise the bar as a flagship Android handset.

I received direct word of the event postponement and now have an invite for the rescheduled event. As it’s slated for Oct. 19 in Hong Kong, I’ll have to pass on attending, but will have an update after the news hits thanks to a live video feed.

The Nexus Prime has already appeared in a video demonstration that loosely validates some of the rumored specifications, such as a 4.65-inch display with 1280×720 resolution, on-screen software buttons in place of capacitive or hardware buttons, and the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google Android.

Google’s quarterly investor call took place this week, with CEO Larry Page saying Ice Cream Sandwich was “soon to be released.” Other interesting Android data shared by Page indicates Google’s growing momentum in the mobile market:

190 million total Google Android devices have been activated.
Mobile revenues for Google have grown 2.5 times in the last 12 months with an annual run-rate now topping $2.5 billion
Google Maps has expanded in August by 40 countries, now supporting 130 nations.

Of course, the populations across that many countries often speak different languages. Google Translate for Android gained broader support for an experimental feature that allows two people to converse in real-time, with both speaking in their native language.

 
Conversation mode already supported English and Spanish, but this week gained a dozen new languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. The software requires a button press before each person speaks, but can greatly assist when visiting a foreign country.

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