7. Nokia Maps, Continued

If you have the map of an area, you can plan routes and find locations without a GPS signal, so you can use it for planning without paying anything. But once you want real navigation and directions, you’ll have to pay for navigation, data or both. And you can’t navigate between two areas that you’ve bought navigation for as separate downloads; so if you drive between the U.S. and Canada, be sure to choose the maps that cover both. Detailed city guides are also available, with details like opening times for attractions, but again they cost extra.

Starting Nokia Maps is like opening Google Earth. You start with a view of the globe and the software zooms in to your most recent location, or your current location if you have a GPS fix. Getting a fix isn’t instantaneous, even with A-GPS, but it’s reasonably fast. Walk out of the subway with the N95 in your pocket in a suburban area and you’ll have a signal before you’ve walked a block. The very first "fix" can take substantially longer, and if you don’t know where you are when you come out of the subway, you could be standing around for up to a minute.

Unlike Ask GPS, the map is always on display, with other features available through a menu assigned to the left soft button. You can see the scale of the map and the GPS strength at the bottom, along with a tally of how much data you’ve downloaded. That’s not just important for how much it costs; if you load several maps one after another and you don’t have a data card, performance can slow down considerably.

As you browse around, names of streets and businesses appear at the top of the screen. When you reach a new area on the map, streets and points of interest are loaded, which can be slow over the air, even with a Wi-Fi connection. You can select which types of location show up as icons and you can switch the map to a dark background, which can be easier to see at night, as well as flipping between the flat 2D map and a simple 3D projection.