Nokia Drive update enables offline route planning, Transport app enters beta

Nokia revamped their mapping apps for their Windows Phone handsets and added one more app to the list of Lumia-exclusive apps. Nokia Drive has gained full offline functionality and is joined by the new app, Nokia Transport, so you can navigate a city with public transport instead of a car.

Nokia Drive for Windows Phone had one big problem at launch – it couldn’t plot a route in offline mode (even if you have downloaded the map for the region). The latest update fixes that and adds other improvements.

The update for Nokia Drive enables offline route planning and updates the UI

It enables Speed limit alerts, which will notify you if you go over the road’s sped limit. Another addition is the option to display different info in the app’s dashboard – time of arrival, time until arrival or distance to destination.

Nokia Transport allows users to plan routes to any destination in a given town using the public transport available (busses, trams, metro or suburban trains). It will also include walking destination to the first bus stop (or metro station, etc.) and from the last stop to your final destination.

Nokia Transport is a convenient way to move around town using public transport

You can pin favorite destinations to the home screen, so you can quickly plan a route home (and also get at a glance departure info).

Transport is available in 270 cities in 45 countries. There’s timetable information for 86 of the cities – here’s the list.

Then there’s Nokia Maps, which is designed to help you explore a city on foot and also find something interesting to visit in the first place. The update will let you save favorite places, share locations over SMS, email or social networks (and those messages include your estimated time of arrival).

Nokia Maps helps you find interesting places and share them with friends

This is a great way to set up a meeting with your friends. They don’t even need to have Lumia phones, the info is shared in a way anyone can view.

The Nokia Drive and Nokia Maps update are coming in the next few weeks. If you have a Lumia but somehow don’t have these two apps installed, you can grab them from the Nokia section of the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Nokia Transport isn’t available there as it’s still in beta – you can download it from Nokia Beta Labsinstead.

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[news]Windows Phone Marketplace expands, details about WP Tango emerge

Microsoft has been working hard in recent time to expand its Windows Phone reach. Evidence of this are the announcements of the entry level Nokia Lumia 610 and now the fact that the company is expanding its Marketplace to 23 more countries.

And here are the countries the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace is now available: Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. The new country additions make up a total of 63 markets where developers can sell their apps.

Windows Phone 7.5 Tango

Tango, as the new update to the Windows Phone 7 OS will be called, will hit devices in April. Mostly it brings support for Windows Phone with 256MB at the expense of few software restrictions.

“Restrictions?”, you may ask. With the announcement of the Nokia Lumia 610 yesterday, it got clear that Microsoft has worked hard to lower the minimum system requirements to bring more affordable WP7-running devices to emerging markets. The Lumia 610 is one example of such devices.

As a result, Tango will have to make some feature-cuts for devices with this low amount of RAM (compared to the 1GB beasts out there). For example, background agents taking care of doing background tasks in Tango on low-RAM devices will be turned off. Fortunately, this doesn’t include playing music while doing something else. Automatic uploads from SkyDrive and Bing Local Scout will too not be able to function.

At this point, not many of the new features are fully disclosed, but MMS ones are among the chief of them. Microsoft has added the ability to add video snippets to MMS messages, as well as voice recordings.

And to help developers a bit with testing their applications on low-end devices, Microsoft has released an update to the SDK for Windows Phone. Now, devs can emulate a 256MB of RAM environment and see how their apps cope with the sparse hardware resources.

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