A few weeks back, Nokia surprised everyone by announcing that their Ovi Maps satellite navigation service will be offered for free on all of their smart phones that are compatible with Ovi maps.

The announcement instantly boosted the overall value of almost every other Nokia smart phone as the devices were instantly transformed into walking and driving navigation tools. While Nokia has yet to explain how it managed to work out such an awesome deal, we are all just too happy that the average Nokia phone will now give you voice instructions to the closest pub –pretty sweet deal isn’t it?

Now, it turns out that Alpine will be teaming up with the Finnish phone manufacturer to bring that unlimited map support to cars. Alpine is a well known “dashboard system manufacturer” for automobiles and this new tie up will allow drivers to dock their Nokia smart phones to their dashboard, output the maps on a larger LCD screen and have the voice navigation to be  on the car’s stereo system. And with the Ovi maps service being completely free, this is some pretty good value for your money –placing GPS manufacturer Tom Tom with some pretty heavy competition from Nokia.

Getting deeper into your car functions, the Alpine setup for the dashboard will enable users to use widgets on the LCD screen. It will not only show your maps, but some other digital information as well. Aside from the usual GPS readouts like destinations and points of interest, the widgets can be made to display fuel levels and other important information –making the effort to glance at the screen well worth it.

So far, the new systems for the dashboard is not yet available; but expect to see the new gear for your car to come out sometime this year.

Read more about the new Nokia and Alpine team up at Mobile Choice UK.