Keys Corner

How some software manages to get on to the market is a puzzle to me.

For the last 3-4 days I have been struggling to download the Nokia Maps which, if I could download them, would allow me to use Nokia’s navigation software with our new mobile phones without having to buy a data contract for the phone to allow it to download the maps in real time. The main focus of the struggle may not be Nokia’s fault. I had to update my Windows 2000 installation (which runs under Parallels on my Mac) to Windows XP, because the Nokia software requires Microsoft’s .Net 3.0 framework to run. The problem is, that after the Nokia software has downloaded about 300 MB it reports a write error to the memory card on the phone and crashes. Then I have to re-download the whole chunk of maps again, because there is no way to restart from where it had got to. This might well be a problem in Parallels’ USB port handling. Why Nokia are incapable of writing software which runs on a variety of platforms, is something only they know; and given that they can’t, it would be nice if they would at least allow you to restart it from the point where it crashes.

However, their apparent attitude to quality assurance in another area makes me very concerned as to whether one can rely on their navigation software at all, if one is able to install it eventually. Maths does not seem to be their strong point – take a look at the screen shot below:

Spain is listed as being 164.8 MB in size. The sum of the Spanish regions shown on the screen shot (which is an incomplete subset of the country) is 213.7 MB. If I set my navigation goal as Madrid, what are my chances of arriving in Barcelona by mistake?

Update:
See the comment to this entry – in fairness to Nokia, it seems the difference is caused by having each map “chunk” overlap with the neighbours, to allow for better ease of use. (It would still be nice if Nokia could support more than only the current Windows platforms (XP, Vista), and allow restarts of failed downloads, however).

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 12:01:36 and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.