I am using V12.2.023 N97 firmware Taiwan variant
in previous versions of Maps I can go to search places and say find an airport nearby or find a gas station nearest to my location.
In this version the feature is missing. Big inconvinience
There is 2 tips to search a POI near your position:
1- when you search an address, type the POI, for example "Petrol" for search all petrol station, if you type "petrol, Name of a City" there will found the petrol station near that city.
2- select drive, select to go somewhere, it is not important, after in the options menu there is "search": Do you remember it?
Navio
Nokia N97 V12.0.024 RM 505
Quite cumbersome... What I miss is just an icon for the POI search by category in the main screen...
If you search for a "Pharmacy", Ovi Maps just find business that has this word in its name, like "John's Pharmacy". If the POI is stored in database as "John's" and category "Pharmacy", it won't be shown in search results.
as written in my previous comment, the point 1 works good, from "find places", if you write Pharmacy in the search box, it will found all the pharmacies. if you write pharmacy, nameofthecity, country it will find the pharmacies in that city in that country.
I tested it in Germany ( in german Apotheke) and in Poland (in polish apteka) and it found them, in the name there is not "pharmacy". Try to write "pharmacy, berlin, germany" in the search box and verify.
It could be that your "John's Pharmacy" that you are searching is not in the DB of the POI, but this is another problem.
the name of category has to be written in english, not in a different language, the same like the name of the nation, i.e. if you search for an address in italy, the name of country has to be Italy and not Italia.
I agree with you that it is better to have the old search of POI because in this way you never make mistake when you are writing a category of POI and you have not to make some effort to remember the right name of it, if you normally you do not speak english
Navio
Nokia N97 V12.0.024 RM 505
Ok, thanks for the tip of writing category in English. But I still think it's cumbersome, as many regular users will try to find POI using their native language... And probably it won't work, as users can mistype even in their own language.
Easier solution: bring back Search by category. ;-)
Please keep in mind that this beta version is limited to English only.