Nokia has until date sold more than 70 million handsets equipped with GPS chipset. Nokia bundles Ovi Maps with all their latest devices for GPS navigation. Until today Nokia used to offer turn by turn navigation in Ovi Maps for a small charge, which today Nokia has made free for selected devices. The devices included in that list are Nokia N97 Mini, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800 Navigation Edition, Nokia E52, Nokia E55, Nokia E72, Nokia 5230, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6730   classic and Nokia X6.

Many of you must have gone through that list again, since you don’t see the current top of the line Nokia N97 in the above list. Yes, Nokia has not made navigation free for N97, which is currently their top of the line handset. All those people who paid 500$-700$ for Nokia N97 have definitely not been treated like a royalowners of a royaldevice by Nokia here. Nokia will be offering free turn-by-turn navigation in 74 countries and in more than 40 languages. Compared to this, Google Maps only offers free turn-by-turn navigation in US.

It will be interesting to see whether Nokia offers free turn-by-turn navigation for Nokia N97 soon or not. There is also an event scheduled by Nokia today, where they will be announcing something bigregarding Ovi. My guess is that Nokia will be releasing a version of Ovi Suite which run on Mac Operating System.

Edit: So it seems that Nokia N97 will be getting the new version of Ovi Maps and free turn-by-turn navigation with a new firmware upgrade. Since the new version of Ovi Maps requires atleast 20MB of free space on the internal memory – which the N97 lacks, Nokia decided to integrate it into the upcoming firmware update.