February 4th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Research & Stats | No Comments »
Nokia has released free navigation for their top smartphones with the release of Nokia Ovi Maps just over a week ago. Yesterday, Nokia announced to have generated one million downloads and Juniper’s Dr Windsor Holden took a closer look at the business.
Before we start, One million downloads in a single week is something for most developers to be proud of. Nokia reacted accordingly;
"We're averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day," said Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President, Nokia. "When we announced free walk & drive navigation we knew it would be a game-changer. The number of people now using their Nokia for navigation, and as a result looking for more location-aware software, is growing faster than even we predicted. This is great news for our 3rd party application developers. Within a matter of days there is an installed base of more than 1 million active users all potentially hungry for new and innovative location-aware apps," continued Anssi Vanjoki. "For the operators too there is a growing opportunity to sell more data-plans and a complete navigation package to existing and new customers."
Fellow analyst Chris Jones from Canalys also reacted to the Nokia news;
"There is a huge appetite for GPS navigation on mobile phones. We estimate there were already 25.9 million people actively using GPS navigation on their mobile phones at the end of 2009," said Chris Jones, VP & Principal Analyst at research firm Canalys.
Now for Juniper;
“Nokia achieved the one million download mark within a week of launch, reaching 1.4 million within two weeks. Even for a free app, this is rapid progress: while Waterslide Extreme clocked two million in its first week on the iPhone last year, this was very much an exceptional case, and only a handful of other apps (all, I believe, for the iPhone) have matched or exceeded Ovi Maps’ download levels in their first seven days.” Said Dr Windsor Holden from Juniper “Secondly, Ovi Maps is only available on a comparatively small number of Nokia smartphone models. (I know this because I tried to download it from the Ovi Store, got very annoyed with the interface and then finally read the part of the press release which listed compatible handsets and found that mine wasn’t among them.)”
“Thirdly
