Notices

The thing is that garmin relies on "3rd party" contractors, that map specific countries.

For an example, see this one. You will get an incomplete map of my country with garmin europe 2009, but you can get the dedicated cd at any GPS-dedicated shop.

Guys there is good news. Not from Nokia that abandoned Maemo5, but ...
look in the navit thread :-)))

Open street map thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38800
Darn these guys deserve a bunch of thanks!

Indeed nokia makes a habit in abandoning devices, that's why they just released up dates for phones made back in 2006.
Could you finally stop polluting?

Garmin always had the best maps.
I would like to see Garmin XT for N900 but with Ovi Maps being free.. I dunno.

Would you just read what Nokia VP said on OVI Maps?
Why are there 4 (!!!) repositories with different Maemo SW, and Nokia already stopping development for Maemo 5 in favor of "next generation maemo devices"???

Anyhow, great community seems to fix this thanks to open SW and OSM :-)

What did nokia's VP say? Link please?
Which 4 repositories? Extras, extras-testing and extras devel are "ahem" proof of heavy development. If there wasn't any developing going on, one would suffice

Sorry, I am writing with my N900 ... and copying links is a ittle bit cumbersome.

The interview is all over the net. "... and Maemo might receive Maps 3.3 as well in next generation ... ".

With the repositories i mean the ones for Maemo 5 , OS2008, ...
WinMo, Android, iPhone seem to have only 1 market each, not one for each device. But maybe we just misinterpret this and M6 will run on N900 ... with Maps 3.3 next year.

1) MAPS

I think you are missinterpreting. Maemo5 has maps 1.0 that are not the same as the maps 2.0 on symbian. For symbian maps 3.0 are beeing worked on.

You might be confusing versions over here because maps 1.0 on N900 is pretty much what maps 3.0 on symbian is going to look like.

And even if it was so grim (current Maps app is not so bad IMO) as you describe, the Maps application is just a viewer, it doesn't matter what version you have, you'll always be able to get the latest maps made by naviteq.


2) Stores and repositories

Android only shows you apps compatible for your current phone since compatibility is greatly broken between devices and android distributions, on maemo you can choose to see apps from OS2008 if you're a developer.
OS2008 partly preserves compatibility, but nokia wants Maemo5 apps to keep to the new "hildon" user interface = look cute, so that's why the repo's aren't merged and many 2008 apps are in extras-devel or testing already.
Also apps running on Maemo5 most probably won't run out of the box on OS2008.

IMHO this is far batter than 3GS games that are still forced to have 3G-like graphics for compatibility's sake.

So in the end you have the app-manager where you can centralize repo's for independent developers that create free apps eg. the repos from this site, repos from paid developers that don't want to go through OVI and prefer other payment methods, all looking like a single app store.
And the OVI store that can also be centralized to the app manager but also viewed from the web.

For winmo there never was one market alone, there's plenty of sources for plenty of distributions and the best source for winmo apps is google.
Android and apple are quite new to the market and it wasn't hard for them to say: all apps go through here.
But even so many android and iphone apps are rejected from the stores for various policy aspects.
Try scooping those out, it's just the nightmare that controlled repo separation prevents...

With maemo it all gets centralized via a repository in the app manager. Developers have more freedom and don't have to lick boot to be allowed in the "store" and we can have all applications in one place by adding an URL.

Conclusion:
It's easier to centralize more download sources into a specific device via an app-manager than force all the developers to follow the same protocol and move all the apps in a "central" store (if you know comunism, you know what those are).

Hope I made it a bit clearer

Just a short info about Bulgarian maps:

In OVI the Bulgarian map is 8,9 MB;
In Garmin Bulgarian map is ~ 35MB.
Huge difference, isn`t it?

But the main difference is that Garmin Bulgarian map is that it is made in Bulgaria by Bulgarian team!!!

In Sygic web site it is mentioned that their map is covering ~51% of the roads in Bulgaria.

So, I think these days it is a waste of time and money to use different map fo Bulgaria than Garmin`s.

Regards.

I made a post on garmin's forum regarding support for maemo, maybe they's consider it fi more of us were to make some noise over there... https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=4503
By noise I mean other topics.

Even if garmin won't consider it, routing for Open street map is on it's way via Navit.
For my country things look pretty good