Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, is now offering Ovi Maps navigation free, challenging free Google Navigation on Android phones.
The new version of Ovi Maps will be available on 10 smartphones to begin with, with others to come, and will come preloaded on new smartphones from March. The maps have also been re-coded to take up a 10th of the space they used to, which should reduce the load on data networks and make the service more popular with carriers
Nokia paid $8.1 billion for Chicago-based Navteq in 2008, acquiring a maps database to compete with Google’s Maps Navigation as well as with navigation device companies such as TomTom and Garmin.
The Finnish company’s smartphone market share fell three percentage points to 39.3 percent in the third quarter, according to Gartner, as Google handsets began to incorporate its Android software.
Although smartphones represented only 14% of mobile devices shipped in 2009, smartphones generated 39% of worldwide traffic on the AdMob network in 2009, reports AdMob (pdf).
Other findings:
- The iPhone OS dominated the North American, Australian and Western European markets. Over that same time period, Apple shipped an incremental 26M iPhone units.
- On a worldwide basis, Nokia lost ground to Apple throughout 2009. Nokia’s share of requests in the AdMob network declined from 33% in Q4 2008 to 18% in Q4 2009. However, Nokia is still the largest device manufacturer by share of requests in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
- Android traffic in the AdMob network has grown dramatically over the last year in North America and Western Europe. In Q4 2008, traffic from Android devices represented only 1% of overall smartphone traffic, compared to 16% in Q4 2009.
- RIM, manufacturer of Blackberry devices, saw its worldwide manufacturer share remain steady in the past year at 3%.
According to Gartner, worldwide mobile application stores’ download revenue exceeded $4.2 billion in 2009 and will grow to $29.5 billion by the end of 2013. This revenue forecast includes end-user spending on paid-for applications and advertising-sponsored free applications. Advertising-sponsored mobile applications will generate almost 25 per cent of mobile application stores revenue by 2013.
