Nokia offers free sat-nav capabilities on its phones

Nokia smart phones will soon come with free navigation software installed.

Free turn-by-turn navigation will be in the hands of Nokia phone owners under a deal announced last night by the company.

For some users this may mean the end of having a separate satellite navigation device in the car, enabling them to rely on a mobile handset.

From March all Nokia phones with GPS capability will come with a free version of Ovi Maps, including walking and driving navigation, plus Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides already loaded.

And owners of 10 high-end smartphones running the Symbian 5.0 operating system can now download the formerly premium paid-for service.

Nokia's head of services sales, Nandita Pal, said the move was aimed at removing the barriers to entry to consumer market adoption of the navigation functionality.

She said that while tech-savvy users were happy to download maps to their phones, it was a hurdle for mass-market usage of the capability.

With maps pre-loaded onto the phones, data costs would be kept to a minimum and consumers could set phones to offline mode to check directions, she said.

Telecommunications analyst Nathan Burley of Ovum said the move was about easing the competition pressure Nokia had been feeling across all sectors of the handset market.

Burley said Nokia's overall market share had fallen globally, most noticeably at the market's top end against rival products such as the iPhone and the Blackberry.