New features on maps.nokia.com and Nokia Maps Suite for Symbian

Some digital navigation is like a paper map in digital form, but not maps.nokia.com. That’s why we have been building many interesting features like 3D maps, heat maps and city pages, which go beyond pure functional needs and help you get the feeling for a city before you visit.
Planning a route from A to B or searching for a place is probably the main reason why you open maps.nokia.com. When you find a place you’re looking for, rather than just seeing the address you’re also presented with much more, giving you a richer experience. Professional reviews, people ratings, pictures, perhaps even a photo-realistic 3D view are all available at nokia.maps.com.

Recognize the best areas of the city with heat maps

We have expanded the heat maps coverage to over 340 cities around the globe. Finding the best areas for shopping, going out, food and entertainment has never been easier. For example, if you are planning to visit San Francisco and want to know where the best shopping experience is, just go to maps.nokia.com and click on Features > Explore Places must be selected > Shopping. By using the zoom controls you can either see the wider heat map or you can take a closer look at those shops by zooming in.

Plan your public transport route

When you have selected the place you want to visit you’ll probably want to plan your route on how to get there. And in a city your best way to get there is on foot or with public transportation. This is why we recently released Nokia Transport for your Nokia Lumia, and now we’ve also extended public transportation options on maps.nokia.com. You can now select your favourite means of transportations (you can exclude regional trains or buses, for example) as well as the time of departure or arrival.

Learn more about a place with City Pages

When ever you travel, you probably take guidance from local travel guides. These are a good way to get to know the place, from a local perspective and usually offer facts with lots of glossy photos. We have followed the same approach for our City Pages and taken it to the next level with the power of maps.nokia.com. When you visit one of our city pages, you get:

A beautiful picture from the great Flickr community that best represents the city at that given time of the day and under the current weather conditions.
A selection of the best places in town (as you can see my favourite ice cream shop in San Francisco is included too).
Interesting city facts that help you understand how much you are roughly going to spend there and that come along with a super cute design.
Weather forecasts for the next 3 days.
Plus, we teamed up with Lonely Planet to provide professional reviews of what to do and where to go.

3D city tours

In five cities (San Francisco, London, Berlin, New York, Las Vegas) you also get one more bonus: a 3D tour powered by Nokia Maps 3D. This is what it looks like in San Francisco:


These 3D tours are just the beginning; in fact, you can also plan a route by car in any of the 25 cities with 3D views and get a helicopter view of the whole route. Take for example this one I created in San Francisco http://nok.it/MrSoN and click on ‘take a 3D flight along the route’.

3D goggles views in Nokia Maps 3D

More 3D news! In fact we have taken Nokia Maps 3D into the third dimension. Now you can experience Nokia Maps 3D in 3D mode. That’s right, the buildings will now jump out the screen at you as you browse your favourite city. You’ll need to a pair of red and cyan to make this work. With the webgl beta version of Nokia Maps 3D you don’t have to install any plugin, provided your browser supports webgl technology (e.g. the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome), and once you’ve found the place you’re looking for, hit the 3D goggles icon in the corner to see the city leap out of your screen.

Stick on your 3D glasses and click the images above for the enlarged “in-your-face” version.

One more thing. Yes, if you have a smartphone with Nokia Belle you can now download the latest version of Nokia Maps Suite and enjoy all the new features we introduced in the beta. You can read the Nokia Maps Blog for all the info.