RIM has shown off some of the latest improvement to BlackBerry Maps and the changes are indeed useful. However, surely there is a market for the likes of TomTom and ALK to enter here, or is the platform problematic for developing turn-by-turn navigation?
Hello developers – I have great news! As part of our continuous effort to improve our map client and the data services behind it, we have added some really exciting features to our BlackBerry® Maps offering. Whether your application uses an embedded MapField or simply invokes BlackBerry Maps to render map data, you can start taking advantage of these new features today!
First, the data coverage has been extended by adding 34 new countries, including Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, New Zealand, The Philippines and Taiwan. I have no doubt that the addition of these new countries in our database will open up a lot of opportunities for app developers in those regions. The figure above shows the current coverage of the BlackBerry Maps service.
After carefully listening to your comments and feedback, we have also spent a significant amount of our efforts to optimize the visual appearance of the maps with a stronger rendering engine as well as with a new color scheme. New POI databases for hospitals, universities/colleges, police stations, train/subway stations, shopping centers, parking, parks and airports were also added wherever available, in order to make the maps as meaningful as possible to the end user. The screenshots below highlight a few of the many visual changes that went in as part of this update.
