Google Maps - Beats Nokia maps hands down!

My wife recently gifted me a high end Nokia mobile phone. Rest assured, we did quite a bit of research on the available options before settling on our final choice (my wife wanted to buy a blackberry but it didn't make sense for me to pay 800 rs for their GPRS+ services while i could pay only 200 rs for unlimited internet from my TSP).

The phone came installed with a Nokia maps application and 3 month free subscription of GPS service. We wanted to test out and took the phone for our visit to Tirumala (more on it in the next blog!), opening it and making some installations the previous night. Sadly, i missed one major application! Nokia maps is pretty good when it comes to the metros. It has mapped all major Indian cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai amongst others. However it has ZERO details of other areas. Some NHs show up in the application but it's coverage is pretty weak. I was surprised (sadly!) that Nokia maps didn't even add a high level map of Tirupati in their application.

I got time to install Google maps after my trip to Tirumala and i was so surprised at their map coverage. It recommended the same path that we took. More so, it has detailed a lot of Tier-2 & Tier-3 cities in India and shows major roads in all these places.

Thumbs down on Nokia maps and astounding thumbs up for Google Maps.