Nokia claims that its decision last month to make its Ovi Maps navigation service available for free has seen the service attract over 1.4 million downloads to date. “We’re averaging a download a second, 24 hours a day,” said Anssi Vanjoki, executive VP at the Finnish vendor. Nokia stated that the one million mark was reached within a week of the launch date (21 January). As of January 31 2010, the top five countries downloading the new version of Ovi Maps were China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the download were the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97, Nokia 5230 and Nokia E72.

Nokia raised eyebrows at the time of launch by giving the service away for free. The company is hopeful that the move will in turn attract more developers to its Ovi platform and boost revenues from other applications. “This is great news for our 3rd party application developers,” added Vanjoki.  “Within a matter of days there is an installed base of more than 1 million active users all potentially hungry for new and innovative location-aware apps. For the operators too there is a growing opportunity to sell more data-plans and a complete navigation package to existing and new customers.”