It would be a clear lie if anybody said that Nokia, apart from making some great hardware, doesn’t really develop good software. MeeGo was a certain proof of that (before the company decided to kill off the project, that is).
Currently, Nokia is in a partnership with Microsoft. But Nokia has an advantage over other Windows Phones in the form of Nokia Drive, an intelligent GPS-based navigation app with required logic built in to help observe traffic and dynamically re-route based on conditions.
And although Android and iOS devices make use of Waze, and each OS has navigation solutions from their respective sources, Nokia Drive has been still rated pretty highly and some of its features that are reportedly superior to other solutions on the market.
Nokia has had an experience with Linux-based environment, and this makes it perfect to offer their location-based apps not only to Windows Phone 8 (Nokia, previously, announced their decision to make Nokia Drive available to all Windows Phone 8 partners), but to Android as well. And who knows, maybe to iOS as well, in the future.
This will have a two way effect. According to Pocketnow’s Joe Levi, “Offering Nokia Drive on other devices provides a chance for Nokia to advertise their brand, something that’s losing popularity in the States. It would be an opportunity to show off what Nokia software can do. The next time a buyer goes to get a phone and sees “Includes Nokia Drive!” featured prominently next to some devices those buyers may be more likely to consider them because they include something familiar.”
But ultimately the decision would lie with Nokia if they are prepared to offer such services on Android and iOS. Only time will tell what happens.
