Maps and navigation
The Nokia N900 has a GPS receiver built into the device itself, with assisted GPS over the mobile connection, and Maemo 5 exposes that receiver to every application through a system location service, so the phone fixes its own position without an external receiver and hands the same fix to Nokia’s Ovi Maps and to community mapping software alike.
The GPS receiver inside the N900
The GPS receiver inside the N900 is part of the hardware, not an accessory, and it was one of the reasons the device was described as a computer that happened to make calls rather than a phone with extras. Maemo 5 routes it through a system location component that applications query rather than a serial port, which is why a mapping program written for the platform did not have to know anything about the chip. Assisted GPS shortens the first fix by pulling assistance data over the network instead of waiting for the receiver to read it from the satellites, and a cold fix with no assistance and no clear sky can take several minutes. Continuous positioning is expensive on a 1320 mAh BL-5J battery, which is why every navigation application on the platform had a setting for how often it asked for a fix.
The device around the receiver matters for maps as much as the receiver does. The Nokia N900 shipped from November 2009 with a 3.5in 800×480 resistive screen, an ARM Cortex-A8 at 600 MHz, 256 MB of RAM and 32 GB of internal storage, and that storage is what made it realistic to keep whole countries of map data on the device rather than streaming tiles.
Ovi Maps on Maemo 5
Ovi Maps on Maemo 5 arrived as Nokia’s own mapping application, preinstalled on the N900 and clearly behind the Symbian version in features for most of the device’s life. It drew Nokia’s map data, searched for places and plotted a position from the receiver, and its early builds on the N900 were plainly labelled as beta by Nokia. Voice guided turn by turn navigation was the piece that lagged: the Symbian branch of Ovi Maps had it first and the Maemo branch followed on its own schedule during 2010. Anyone who wanted a fully featured navigator on the N900 in its first months used the community software instead, which is the general shape of the platform and the reason What you could actually install matters more on Maemo than the vendor list of applications does.
When Nokia made turn by turn navigation free
Nokia made turn by turn navigation free in January 2010, when the company announced that walk and drive guidance in Ovi Maps would be included with the download on its GPS equipped smartphones rather than sold as a subscription or a licence. Nokia’s own announcement put the map data, the voice guidance and the traffic and travel guides in the same free package. The change is easy to underrate fifteen years later. Standalone satellite navigation units were a product category in 2010 with their own retail shelves, and removing the recurring fee from software on a phone that already had the receiver, the screen and the data connection took most of the argument for a second device away.
The 2010 announcement covered Nokia’s smartphone line, and the Symbian devices were the ones named in it. The N900 ran Maemo 5, not Symbian, and its build of Ovi Maps followed its own release schedule. Old links about that announcement still point at this domain. This site is an independent reference written after the fact, not Nokia, not maemo.org and not the blog that published the original article, and it hosts no firmware and no repackaged applications.
Downloading maps before you leave the network
Downloading maps before leaving the network was the practical half of the free navigation change, because guidance that needs a data connection stops being useful at exactly the moment it is worth having. Nokia’s desktop map loader wrote whole country and region map sets to the device over USB, and the routing engine then worked with the radio switched off or with roaming disabled. Community applications solved the same problem the other way, by caching OpenStreetMap tiles to the 32 GB of internal storage as you browsed a route in advance. Both approaches trade storage for independence from the network, and on a device with that much internal flash the trade was cheap.
Community mapping software in the Extras catalogues
The community mapping software in the Extras catalogues covered the ground Ovi Maps did not, and it is the reason a fifteen year old N900 with a working receiver is still a usable navigator. Maemo Mapper came forward from the earlier internet tablets, where it had been the standard mapping application since the 770 and N800 era. Navit brought a full turn by turn routing engine with voice output on OpenStreetMap data. modRana was written in Python for these devices and kept being maintained long after Nokia stopped. All of them were installed as Debian packages through the Application Manager rather than from a storefront, which is the arrangement described under The Maemo repositories, and it is the sharpest difference between how Maemo distributed software and how The Ovi Store did.
The N900 and the N8 as navigation devices
| Attribute | Nokia N900 | Nokia N8 |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Maemo 5, Debian based Linux | Symbian^3 |
| On sale from | November 2009 | 2010 |
| GPS | Integrated receiver with assisted GPS | Integrated receiver with assisted GPS |
| Magnetometer | None, so no compass heading when stationary | Yes, digital compass |
| Screen | 3.5in 800×480 resistive | 3.5in 640×360 AMOLED, capacitive |
| Free Ovi Maps navigation | Maemo build, later than the Symbian branch | Included from launch |
| Third party navigators | Navit, modRana, Maemo Mapper and others as packages | Symbian applications only |
The comparison between the N900 and the N8 as navigation devices comes down to two things. The N8 is the better plain navigator out of the box: it has the magnetometer, so it knows which way you are facing while standing still, and it had the free Ovi Maps guidance from the start. The N900 is the more open one, because anything that compiles for a Debian based ARM system and can read a location service is a candidate, and the 32 GB of internal storage swallows offline map sets without complaint.
What happened to the maps after Nokia
The maps outlived the company arrangement that produced them. Nokia’s mapping division was rebranded as HERE in 2012 and sold to a consortium of German carmakers in 2015, so the Ovi branded services the N900 was built to talk to no longer exist, and the assistance servers went with them. The receiver itself still works, because GPS is a broadcast service that needs no vendor account and no back end. That is why the practical answer for anyone with one of these devices now is a community application on OpenStreetMap data rather than the preinstalled one, and it is the same answer that holds along the rest of the lineage, through MeeGo and Harmattan on the N9 and into Sailfish OS, where mapping is again a mixture of one vendor application and community clients on open data.