Google has signed a five-year deal with mapping company Tele Atlas that will see mapping data from almost 200 countries shared on Google's online and mobile applications.Google's main mapping programs, Google Maps and Google Earth, have fascinated online users for years now. However, it's the enhancement that Tele Atlas will make to Google's mobile mapping capabilities that is proving the most captivating for mobile web fans.
The deal, which was announced on Monday, could see Google and its upcoming Android mobile software in a much better position to rival market leader Nokia's Navteq mobile navigation service - at least, when Android is finally released later this year.
In January 2007, a prophetic bigmouthmedia reporter explored the possibility of Google Maps for mobile eclipsing satellite navigation systems in popularity and since this time, much has happened to corroborate this early hypothesis.
The rapid success of the iPhone, for example, has meant that Google Maps mobile usage increased sharply after its release in July 2007. And in December, Google Maps teamed up with popular sat nav firm TomTom, enabling users to search for and send business addresses direct from Google Maps to a TomTom portable device.
Interestingly, Tele Atlas has just been acquired by TomTom, with the sat nav company only recently having received approval from the European Union form the merger.
So will we see a new frontier in mobile maps search as Google and Nokia go head to head? According to Information Week, it's less likely than it seems, as Nokia-Navteq appears to target pedestrian directions and Google-Tele Atlas is more focused on automotive GPS.
However, with Google creeping ever further into the mobile sphere, existing market leaders like Nokia are certain to want to make their products as competitive as possible in the face of its approaching might.
Last week, Nokia bought the remaining shares in Symbian, making the British mobile software firm open source through the establishment of the Symbian Foundation. This move clearly seems to anticipate the entrance of Google Android into the mobile software market, in an effort to protect Symbian's majority share - currently, it's found on over two thirds of mobile handsets globally.
Nokia has also just signed a deal with Orange, with the aim of signing up another 10 million mobile maps users by 2010. So while Google might be able to count on its established online map user's transfering their habits to the mobile realm, they will certainly have a lot to contend with in the form of the Finnish mobile firm.
What's certain, however, is that the advances in mobile mapping indicate great things for the future of the mobile internet - and really could mean the end of more traditional sat nav devices, as bigmouthmedia predicted all those months ago.
