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Wednesday, July 09, 2008

See Google Earth placemarks in Nokia maps application on phone

I collect a lot of placemarks in Google Earth. After buying my N82, I was extremely excited by the Nokia Maps application, but was disappointed as Nokia uses their own proprietary format call LMX in order to show placemarks (called landmarks by Nokia) in the application. So I searched for a method to transfer all my Google Earth placemarks to the Nokia Maps application. Here is the method I use:
  1. Save the placemarks folder in your My places as KML.
  2. Use POIConverter to convert the KML file you just saved to ASC format. You can download POIConverter from here.
  3. Use this site to convert the ASC file to Nokia LMX format. (Note that the site claims to convert KML files to LMX files, but I always get a problem in that. The site doesn't read the KML file properly, that's why we are first converting to ASC format. If POIConverter introduces LMX in the next version, then nothing like it.)
  4. Connect phone to computer and transfer the LMX file to phone memory
  5. Open the LMX file in the phone by browsing that folder. You will be shown a list of all the places with a checkbox against each. Don't click on any checkbox.
  6. Save all landmarks. Do this by going to Options->Save->Save all. It will save all the landmarks in the LMX file and make them visible in the Nokia Maps Application.
  7. Open Nokia Maps. All landmarks are now loaded.
If there is a better way to do this, then please post it in the comments.