Nokia City Lens comes out of beta

Last week we were talking about all the new features of Nokia Maps for the Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820. Nokia Maps is going to work completely offline, offer voice guided turn-by-turn navigation and venue maps. What is even more revolutionary is that the new Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820 are going to get a GPS or GLONASS fix within seconds even without being assisted by network connection.
Along with that, we have introduced Nokia City Lens last May with a beta programme to collect your precious feedback and your improvement suggestions. Your response has been overwhelmingly positive and we are proud to have officially released our augmented reality app to the Windows Phone Marketplace for Nokia Lumia 900, Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710. And we also have a specific version for the newest Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820 in the works.

What is Nokia City Lens?

Download Nokia City Lens now
Press the Search button on your Nokia Lumia and then tap Vision
Scan the barcode
Tap on the link when it appears on the screen
Install the application from the Windows Phone Marketplace
For those who haven’t tested the beta, Nokia City Lens is Nokia’s location-based augmented reality application. Using the phone’s camera viewfinder, Nokia City Lens provides an augmented reality overlay view of buildings and instantly highlights places of interest.

It basically turns sight into the next interface for searching the world around you. The app then provides information about each building or landmark in the area giving the user an at-a-glance understanding of what restaurants, museums, shops and others places of interest are nearby. Seeing a place of interest through augmented reality provides a wealth of information not available with the naked eye, allowing you to see the world around you using your smartphone instead of having to perform web searches.

You can download Nokia City Lens now for your Nokia Lumia 900, Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710 now, following the instructions above.

More features in the Windows Phone 8 version

We are not only developing Nokia City Lens for Nokia Lumia 900, Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia 710, but we are also going to release the app for the new Windows Phone 8 smartphones Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820, introduced last week. The new mobile operating system, powered by the Nokia Location Platform, is allowing us to introduce some very cool new features.

The first to be introduced will be a new 3D icons layout, which is going to make the augmented reality experience look even more realistic. We are also going to fix a common problem of augmented reality apps. If you don’t see a place in real life, because it’s hidden behind a building, you might want to see it or not among nearby search results. We give you the choice: you will be able to filter search results so that only those in the line of sights are visible.

The upcoming version of Nokia City Lens for Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820 is also going to make more use of Windows Phone unique features. For instance you will be able to pin to start any category tile, to find faster what you are looking for, anywhere you are. You can also customize the Nokia City Lens menu by adding your own favorite searches. Last but not least you can also use Nokia City Lens in both landscape and portrait mode.