Nokia Corporation (NOK) is ‘Secret Sauce’ Behind Kindle Fire Mapping

Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) has been getting some rave reviews for its mapping service and its City Lens service, which is available not only on many Nokia handsets, but it turns out that Nokia has been aggressive in offering its platform to several other mapping services – including one that wasn’t actually being very forthcoming about its services and their origins.

Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has mapping capability on its next-generation Kindle Fire tablets, and for the longest time was not saying much about it, though it had been presumed that Amazon was no longer working with Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) due to direct competition in the tablet space. However, the company tried to give the impression that it had created its own proprietary mapping software application. Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) apparently decided it was in its best interest to spill the beans, so it made the official word recently that Nokia Maps is the platform that is used on the Kindle Fires, which joins up with other alignments – Nokia Maps is apparently also the platform of choice at Yahoo! Maps and many services on Bing, the search engine developed by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT).

‘The Nokia Location Platform is the most advanced mobile location platform with a unique global footprint.” Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) said in a statement. “It provides maps for almost 200 countries (with more than 100 of them navigable) and provides the best, automotive-grade map quality based on industry-leading technology and more than 20 years expertise in mapping. … Amazon’s decision to choose the Nokia Location Platform is further proof point that our competence in this space is a key differentiator also for other leading players in the industry to offer great location consumer experiences.”

While Nokia Corporation (NYSE:NOK) is trying to get back into the smartphone market with its Lumia handsets running the new Windows Phone 8 operating system by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT), to have inroads with its mapping platform is some tablet computers – potentially taking away some Google Maps market share – can be a positive step forward the company and may make its dirt-cheap stock more valuable moving forward.