Nav4All Navigation gets shut down by Navteq
by Mac Jadalhack
Sadly, Nav4All has taken a step down and will no longer be available within three days. Last night I got an email on my personal Gmail account as I did give this app a try back in the day. For those who don’t know, Nav4All is a basic free GPS navigation app that’s been around supporting BlackBerry for years. I can recall using it on my BlackBerry Pearl 8100 with a Bluetooth GPS unit. Basically what happened was that Nav4All had a data license agreement with Navteq which is primarily a Nokia subsidiary and that license was not extended in a “totally unexpected manner.” So what do you do now for your GPS? If you were relying on Nav4All before, there are other alternatives. Not to be pushing premium applications here, but TeleNav and Garmin are by far the best GPS applications I have ever used on BlackBerry. As for free ones, you should definitely check out Amaze GPS as their services are still free up until now. Continue reading to check out the full email letter from the folks over at Navteq.
“It is with the deepest regret that we hereby notify you that the global navigation of Nav4All and the Tracking & Tracing will go offline in 3 days. The reason for the same is that the data licence agreement with Navteq (a 100% Nokia subsidiary) was not extended, in a totally unexpected manner. It is not possible to implement data from another supplier in our Nav4All systems within the short term. The Nav4All navigation system was developed for Navteq data. Nav4All has therefore been constrained to stop.
We greatly regret the fact that we have to suspend the operation of our service. With your help, we have developed Nav4All into a global product with 27.5 million users in 56 languages, in 5 years. This has made Nav4All the largest navigation supplier. This large number of users also has to do with the fact that Nav4All works on hundreds of different mobile telephones of many makes such as Blackberry, Sony
Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Android, HTC, Nokia, LG, Iphone, Ipod etc.
After 5 years of testing and market development, we witnessed rapid - in fact, exponential – growth during the last two years. That growth was reported in the licence reports to Navteq. In mid-December 2009, the global coverage was extended to include the Philippines, Morocco and Kenya.
Please contact the Nav4All support desk in case you have any questions: www.nav4all.com/support. If there is any further information from Nav4All concerning the subject of this letter, the same will be published on our website: www.nav4all.com. For reasons of privacy, Nav4All does not have the email addresses of all its customers, and we therefore request you to forward this email to the maximum extent possible, in order to ensure that everyone is informed.”
-by Mac Jadalhack
