Last week we reported on Vodafone’s sat nav iPhone app with its £3 a month subscription fee. Seven days on and it now looks as relevant as tracking your route by dropping breadcrumbs out of the car window as you drive.

Today, Nokia have unveiled free turn-by-turn sat nav on a wide range of their phones. That’s free. Gratis. For nowt. Forever.

Nokia say that the Ovi Maps application will be compatible with 10 current handsets, including the N97 Mini, E72 and 5800 XPressMusic, and will be pre-loaded on every GPS-enabled handset sold from March 2010.

The 2D and 3D maps will load on to phones over the air or via a computer, meaning there’ll be no drop of service if you stray into an area with little or no 3G signal.

Ovi Maps will cover a total of 180 countries, with turn-by-turn information available for 74 of those, in 46 different languages. Traffic data will also be available for ten countries, including the UK, although traffic data use would be live and require a mobile internet connection, forming part of a mobile phone tariff.

Could this spell the beginning of the end for traditional sat nav companies such as TomTom and Garmin? TomTom’s shares fell by 3.7 percent earlier this morning following the Ovi Maps announcement, while Nokia’s shares rose by 1.3 percent.

[Thanks to HUKD member jpxdude]

The crowd-pleasing Spotify Mobile service is already a massive hit on the iPhone and it looks as though the music-pumping Swedes have got plans for global mobular phonical domination.

They’ve announced that Spotify will be coming to the HTC Hero smartphone via 3 Mobile as of 3^rd November. Better still, Spotify’s presence will be featured as a marketing tool for the phone – in addition to £99 for the Hero handset, a 24-month contract will cost £35 a month, with Spotify included in the tariff for the two-year period.

iPhone users of Spotify currently have to sign up and pay for the Premium service, which costs £10 per month.

Other features of the Hero’s impressive tariff include 750 minutes to other mobiles, unlimited texts, unlimited data, as well as other established 3 tariff features such as free calls via Skype.

If you can put up with being on the 3 network and their legendarily shitty customer service, it seems like a hell of a deal. Truly, the era of the Smartphone Wars is upon us. Oh, the stories we’ll be able to tell to our children, our children’s children, our children’s children’s children and all their daft little mates…

Smart phones are going to get a hell of a lot smarter – with the implementation of new technology, they’ll be able to tell you when you’ve fallen asleep at the wheel AND microwave small portions of food.

Of course, that’s all a load of crap we just made up there. But high-end phones will soon be getting the full version of Adobe’s Flash software, bringing them a step closer to being as clever as real computers that you can’t fit in your pocket.

At the moment, 40% of smartphones have Flash Lite installed but the newest version of Flash, Flash 10.1 has been developed with mobile browsing in mind. Flash Lite will continue to be operate on ‘low-end’ handsets (whatever that means – ones with dried, encrusted blood on them?)

The new software will be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop operating systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year, while versions for Android and Symbian are expected early next year.

Of course, the iPhone won’t be joining in with the party – the phone doesn’t support Flash and there are no immediate plans for that to change although Ben Wood, director of mobile research at analyst firm CCS Insight, told BBC News: “As momentum builds, I think Apple will have little choice but to embrace it. Watch this space.”

Woooohhhhhh – fighting talk!

Despite the fact the iPhone has been scientifically proven by scientists to be much better than any other smartphone, some people just won’t accept the facts. You can’t argue with science, folks – it puts the sun in the sky and the beat in your heart, and it says the iPhone rocks.

You may disagree, of course. Like Creationists, you may choose to deny the science and live without the Jesus Phone. Yes, the iPhone does in fact prove the existence of God. No, there are no contradictions in those last two statements. Be quiet. So what are you going to do for a smartphone, then? You’re going to buy the Palm Pre, which is edging ever closer to these shores on a slow boat across the oceans.

It turns out the Pre enjoyed a modestly decent debut, selling over 300,000 handsets in the US in just a fortnight; not quite as spectacular as the iPhone 3GS shifting over a million units in three days, but then Palm hardly has the profile of Apple. And there’s news on a service provider for the Pre in the UK – it’s expected that Palm will this week confirm O2 have exclusive rights to sell the handset in this country.

Given the importance of the Pre to Palm’s future – it’s widely regarded as the company’s last-gasp attempt to stay in business – it may seem a bizarre choice to hand it to O2. While the service provider currently has the largest share of the market by revenue, it’ll be difficult for O2 to aggressively market an iPhone rival without harming their own sales. Perhaps Palm should have awarded the deal to Orange who, according to the Guardian, were biting Palm’s hand off for it?

But pitching Orange against O2 could have been even more disastrous for Palm; O2 could have went to town with the iPhone and sunk the Pre. At least this way, by effectively placing the Pre in the hands of the enemy, O2 is accountable and can’t attack it – O2 will be forced to manage the competition between the two products, perhaps to Palm’s advantage and Apple’s detrement.

How will O2 market the Pre, exactly? Well, given Palm’s history and Pre features such as a physical keyboard, it’s possible O2 will target business users rather than the masses attracted to the iPhone. Still no word on a UK launch date, but expect it sometime in the Autumn.

[Guardian]

I’ve yet to sit in a car with a driver aided by GPS, and reach a destination any quicker than I would if I’d used a map. There’s always some troublesome problem with the directions given, or a conflict of personalities between the small black box and the person behind the wheel. Or it can’t establish a satellite lock. Or the batteries die.

Fortunately I’ve only ever followed directions off the back of an envelope or a printout of Google Maps, so I won’t be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Because the technology could be about to fail catastrophically; the GPS satellites that are operated by the US Air Force are thought to be on the brink of breaking down, and that could happen as early as next year.

The US government accountability office (GAO) says that although over £1 billion has been spent so far on updating the 20 year old technology, delays and overspending means there’s a danger of regular blackouts, system failures or providing inaccurate information to GPS systems. Technical issues and problems with contractors mean the first of several replacement satellites won’t be launched until the end of the year – nearly three years late.

Obviously having GPS fall over not only threatens in-car navigation but every other household product that is becoming increasingly dependent on the data – including smartphones. Then we’d have to find another use for our complex handsets packed with technology. Like making phone calls, for example.

[The Guardian]

If you’ve got a smartphone and fancy watching the BBC’s daytime telly offering on the quiet while you work, get yourself over to the beta site of Live TV – Heir Hunters is on now, with Murder She Wrote to follow very soon.

We’re told that the new site streams live TV and radio to Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones like the Android G1 and Nokia N Series devices, although the Beta version doesn’t seem to be compatible with the iPhone just yet. The Beeb hopes to extend Live TV out to 3G networks and to add more channels throughout the coming months, but you’ll need an up-to-date TV licence to be able to watch it with a clear conscience.

With any luck, rival broadcasters will stick their oars in and have a go as well, and dull early morning work meetings can be livened up by everyone crowding around a mobile phone to watch slack-jawed reprobates trading insults and blows with each other on the Jeremy Kyle freak show.

[Register]