When we told you that Nokia Maps — not Nokia Drive — will soon be available for free to all Windows Phones we didn’t think of it this way. Instead of Espoo making it available to everyone, XDA Developers recently did.

Nokia recently released its Maps application for the Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 but XDA Developers managed to get their hands on the XAP file (which is basically the installation package) and made it available online. If you have an unlocked Windows Phone, either by official Microsoft dev-unlock or ChevronWP7 Labs, you can sideload the application on your non-Nokia Windows Phone. However, if reports turn out to be true, an official Marketplace version should be available soon for everyone that doesn’t like Bing (or Bing doesn’t support their region).

Nokia Drive — the navigation software — was reportedly recently hacked on other devices too, and about this software bit we know that Nokia had no intentions of bringing to other phones. This raises the question, again: will jailbreaking Windows Phones boost homebrew development or piracy?

Source: XDA Developers

Via: WinRumors