Maemo5? Nowhere's been told that at no time.

Nokia also taking shots at Google as far as costs to network providers are concerned.

Arshia Varlet (Nokia): The N900 will be added to list of compatible devices soon via phone arena on twitter
http://twitter.com/FoneArena/status/8022903616

Well, it's not like maemo is just 2 months old, so I don't see what you are trying to say there. Or do you think Nokia began developing OVI maps for Maemo only the moment the N900 came out?

74 countries that have free voice guidance in Ovi maps currently:

Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Bahrain, Belgium, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, China / Hong Kong / Macau, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, DOM, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, La Reunion, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, USA, Vatican, Venezuela.


Or Europe, North America, Middle East, most of South America and select countries in Africa and Asia

of course not but ovi maps on maemo is new where as its 2 years old on symbian, see the difference

dont care if its not free, but i want turn-by-turn gps!

Wonder if those free Lonely Planet and Michelin guides are any good. Has anybody bought those on Symbian?

I was travelling to Seattle from London a few months back, and anticipated the same sort of data costs. I worked around it quite easily by using MaemoMapper, and using my WiFi at home to download and cache maps for the region. I did this for Google Maps, Google hybrid maps, and OpenStreetmap, giving me the ability to switch back and forth. If I remember correctly, I pulled down map zoom levels of 11 & 9 for the entire western third of Washington, levels 9 & 7 for the specific Everett - Federal Way section, and 9-7-5 from downtown out to the areas where I was going to be staying with relatives. I then added a similar detailed set data for the San Juan Islands, as I thought we might go whale watching. Downloading took a little bit of time for each set, but it didn't distract me much from the TV show I was watching at the time. Elapsed time was 1 hour or so. This was on my N810.

What this gives you is *not* routing, it gives you maps. If you want routing, the data cost of going online to compute a route and then use it offline with the cached maps should be low. Since there are no voice directions, you'll have to depend on your co-pilot to read from the N900. Unless your co-pilot has higher gadget tolerance than mine, swapping driving duties might be sensible. For holidaying, I find maps from OpenStreetmap to be significantly nicer than the "just roads" focus of TomTom/Naviteq maps as the wiki-like nature of things positively encourages people to list parks, walking paths, etc. http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=51...layers=B000FTF and http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-4...layers=B000FTF are two examples.

There's a good set of quick bullets on MaemoMapper at http://wiki.maemo.org/Navigation_Tools.