Useful as it may be when you’re barreling cross-country, your in-car TomTom isn’t going to do you one spot of good when you’re hopelessly lost, traipsing the backstreets of Rome or Paris. Nokia aims to transform the way you trek about town with its latest GPS handsets and a new generation of its digital mapping optimized for hoofers. Now available in beta, Nokia Maps 2.0 is customized for pedestrian navigation, providing multimedia city guides and visual turn-by-turn directions rooted in the digital maps developed by mapping data giants Navteq (which Nokia is conveniently in the process of acquiring).

Harnessing the application for the mass market, Nokia’s 6210 Navigator handset is due this summer, and promises to bring GPS out of the car and onto the sidewalk, with a built-in compass to tell pedestrians the direction they’re walking. iPhone acolytes might shrug and, mistakenly, compare Apple’s Maps feature to Nokia’s nav tech. The difference, however, is the accuracy and reliability that satellite-based GPS has over the iPhone’s cellular triangulation — not to mention a raft of multimedia navigational cues for directions even a drunken stumbler could follow. Better yet, the mobile mapping will be a feature of the video-focused Nokia N96 (due fall), successor to the N95, aka the hottest handheld this side of Cupertino.