I wrote a piece giving my first impressions of Nokia Maps 3.0 a few days ago. I found the app quite good, but it didn’t come with a free licence for visual and voice directions.

Drive navigation, the term that Nokia uses for this, is a premium service requiring a subscription. I decided that in order to give the application a fair review I needed to try Drive Navigation out.

Fortunately, Nokia Maps has a menu embedded that lets users subscribe right on the handset you are using. Well, I dived in there, and was presented with the various subscription plans and fees, as well as a form to enter my credit card details.

In a few moments, I had purchased a 30-day licence. I recieved an SMS receipt:

I had also opted for an email version of the recipt (which contained more details).

The whole order process was smooth and easy. Impressive. Mobile commerce, if done right as in this case, will encourage more mobile users to make purchases right on their devices.

The 30-day subscription costs just N999.00, which is significantly less than most people spend on airtime monthly (Okay, okay; I’m speaking for myself), and it was completed under 5 minutes.

The payment services was handled by Tanla Oy, a company with indian origins that offers end-to-end mobile commerce, mobile entertainment, mobile internet and mobile advertising solutions.

After I entered my licence code in the appropriate menu on the phone, I was ready to go:

I’ll be putting Nokia Maps through its paces over the next few weeks. In addition, I’ll be doing same with Garmap for Mobile, which I also wrote about just yesterday.

Looks like I’ll be having fun for some time. Hopefully, I won’t get myself lost following either application Which is very, very unlikely, judging by what I have seen so far.

In the meantime, kudos to Nokia for making it easy to get a subscription to the Nokia Maps Drive navigation service.