Where’s Wal-Mart? The Failure of Nokia Maps

02 Sep 2008

The single biggest reason I use a mapping application on my phone is the ability to find something. I’m sitting here at home and I want to find where the nearest Walmart is. Actually, I know where it is, I just want to see if Nokia Maps on my Nokia N95 8GB can find it. After several “not found” message–something not acceptable when really it’s because of some other error–I got the following search result:

I know I’m not near a Walmart, but is Mexico really the nearest one? Ok, so what happens if I add a hyphen and search for Wal-Mart:

Ah, that’s much better. What about Google Maps? Walmart shows:

Apparently, Google lists it as Wal-Mart, but is smart enough to that when I typed Walmart, I actually meant Wal-Mart. I repeated the test with another place I know we need to go soon: Big O Tires. Nokia Maps sent me to Canada!

Meanwhile Google Maps was able to find the nearest Big O Tires:

I could go on, but you get the idea. Only one word can describe this experience: FAIL.

While I’m big on using dogfood (e.g. these pictures are hosted on Share on Ovi), Nokia Maps is one piece of dogfood I can’t bring myself to use. I can only hope my comrades in Nokia fix this problem, and quickly!

The PhoneBoy Blog

Where’s Wal-Mart? The Failure of Nokia Maps

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