Nokia Aiming To Bring HERE Maps To BlackBerry 10?
Nokia’s not making any stops now that its HERE Maps app has been released, earning mixed reviews. Instead, the company is aiming to expand HERE Maps to “all screens and OS [operating systems]” including, potentially, BlackBerry 10.
“Our strategy is to be on all screens and OS, we have not made any announcement about BB10 though,” Nokia spokesperson Reija Sihlman told TPM in a statement.
Research In Motion, was similarly coy about the potential of Nokia HERE Maps for its soon-to-be released devices.
“We are working with partners around the world who are leaders in their areas to bring the best capabilities and features to BlackBerry 10,” a RIM spokesperson said in a statement. “We have a strong and positive working relationship with TomTom as we build out the mapping application and developer tools for BlackBerry 10, and have not yet shared additional information about our BlackBerry 10 mapping partners or software.”
Still, even the mere mention of BlackBerry 10 as a distinct possibility underscores Nokia’s plans to become the go-to mapping service on mobile devices of all sorts, even those that are in direct competition with its new Nokia Lumia line running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.
Nokia maintains a list of mobile devices that its map offerings are currently available on, either as apps or a mobile website. The new HERE branding — which refers to all of Nokia’s previous map data under the Nokia Maps brand, and new features such as 3D views and community edited views — is currently only used to refer to the Nokia’s map app for Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and its map app for the Amazon Android Appstore.
Nokia is taking a curious approach to Android, though, demonstrating an “Android OS-based reference application” at its HERE unveiling event in San Francisco on November 13 and promising to release an Android software development kit (SDK) to allow developers outside the company to build Android apps using Nokia’s map data.
Yet, to date, there isn’t any Nokia HERE Maps app in the main Android app store.
Also, as it turns out, that HERE SDK for Android won’t be opened up to just any aspiring independent developer:
“Initially the HERE SDK for Android will be available for partners like OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] in early 2013,” Sihlman said in a statement.
In other words: Other companies, namely phone makers, will get to build apps from Nokia HERE data first.
The first BlackBerry 10 devices are also due out in January of the coming year. But BlackBerry has relied on its own in-house mapping solution up until recently, when it announced a partnership with Dutch GPS company Tom Tom for traffic data (TomTom is also one of the providers of map data for Apple’s own much-maligned maps app).
