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South Africa’s most accurate traffic service arrives free for Nokia smartphones

11 August 2011

Nokia South Africa has launched the latest update to Nokia Maps which shows people real-time traffic conditions, enabling them to pre-plan the quickest and most environmentally-efficient route. Nokia Maps traffic includes updates on congestion, road closures, road works and other traffic incidents, colour-coding roads as red, amber or green depending on traffic flow. Nokia Maps comes pre-loaded on all Nokia smartphones, and provides free turn-by-turn voice guided navigation, forever.

The Nokia Maps traffic service receives high-quality information from digital traffic sensors, and commercial and government partners via Nokia’s subsidiary NAVTEQ, as well as crowd-sourced information from users. With crowd-sourcing, the more people that use the service, the more accurate it will get.

Traffic is just the latest feature available in the new Nokia Maps, with people already using the app for drive and walk navigation, weather, checking in to their favourite social network, or getting quality location information via services like Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor or Qype.

Nokia Maps has the most accurate road mapping in South Africa, including 100 percent coverage of the road network (554 239 km), with speed limits for major roads and lane guidance for all motorways. Walk navigation is available for Cape Town and Johannesburg.

In addition to the new features for mobile, Nokia Maps for desktop (http://maps.nokia.com) has also been updated and now includes incredible photo-realistic 3D imaging of Cape Town, amongst other major global cities. To capture these images, specialised camera equipment takes an image per second of the same object, up to 100 times, each at a different angle. Images are then joined together to form the 3D object using image processing software. Along with 3D, ‘heat mapping’ has been added to Nokia Maps, providing a way to track the highest density of particular points of interest in a city. This feature is particularly useful when discovering a new city for the first time.