A neighbourhood-friendly App in Nokia phones

Want to know the nearest restaurant or transport facility available in your neighbourhood?

The City Lens augmented reality browser on Nokia’s Lumia (Microsoft Windows) and Belle (Symbian) devices are a guide to everyday needs. It allows the user to explore options in food, hotel, shopping, landmarks, transport and entertainment.

Available at Nokia Beta Labs, the App has data from 196 countries, including India, and for nearly 2,000 cities and towns in India. The user has to choose from the options: food, hotel and landmarks, and point the device in the direction of search. A list of the places available in the direction comes on the screen with details of distance. When the specific place is chosen, the address, photos, reviews, and directions to reach the place are available. There are multiple sources for data collection in each city for this feature, apart from the Nokia points of interest.

Another feature available on Lumia phones is public transport. The feature is available for 11 Indian cities now. Only the schedules of public transport are available. In other countries, real-time update of the transport service is available. For instance, when details of the destination and the current location are entered, a point-to-point information on public transport is available. It also provides different modes of public transport and real-time update of the schedule.

(The correspondent was at Nokia’s design studio in Helsinki recently on invitation by the company).

Nokia Cheap With Lumia Lighting Up Demand

Nokia’s stock took a hit last Thursday and declined by more than 6%. The broader market sold off heavily on European concerns and it now looks like the the first version of the Lumia phone will be a lower end version sold through T-Mobile rather than AT&T as some had speculated.
The company also announced plans to sell off its luxury subsidiary Vertu. ^[1] With the stock down 20% or so during the last month, we believe that it’s discounting the potential impact from the Lumia line of smartphones.

DigiTimes came out with a report that component suppliers in Taiwan expect orders from Nokia to grow 20% in 2012 as the demand for Lumia smartphones increases. ^[2]
Lumia smartphones are the first devices that Nokia has introduced based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.