[ah2819]

Nav4All is sending out emails today stating that their navigation system will be shut down in 3 days. Nokia hasn't renewed their licence for Navteq maps (or wouldn't renew it at the right price?), so they are going to have to shut down the service. I was kind of expecting something to change with Nav4All since their website says "FOR YOU, FOR FREE (until 01-01-2010)", but I didn't expect it to end this way.

They have a copy of the email on their website - www.nav4all.com

[siemp]

News:

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 28-01-2010 16:30 GMT+1

Subject: Nav4All navigation shut down by Navteq

Letter to 27,625,631 Nav4All navigation customers

Dear Customers,

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.

Kind Regards,

Hennie J.M. Groot Koerkamp (CEO)
Nav4All BV
Keizersgracht 62-64
1015 CS Amsterdam NL


The text of this e-mail will be available on our website as soon as possible in the following languages: Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Indonesian.

[dlowrie]

do you know any other free navigation systems for a Blackberry to replace Nav4all?