At first look, The Verge felt that “it certainly seems as though it’s doing an accurate job presenting depth and distance based on scrolling around.”

The MyNokiaBlog is more enthusiastic: “The depth really is something. It’s like you’re actually standing over all of these buildings. It’s crazy! Especially when you begin to pan around and rotate  The last time I was this amazed, it was the debut of Nokia Maps 3D itself.”

They even had a cool pic of 3D maps with 3D glasses – see below:

Nokia4Us checked out 3D maps with the 3D glasses that he won from Nokia sometime back.

Unleash the Phone’s title said everything: “ Nokia Maps 3D gets.. an Actual 3D Mode! [Avatar Style, y'all].”  We are yet to experience reality as giant blue aliens, but this seems like a good start

Vaibhav from The Handheld Blog says: “I haven’t been able to try the new mode out yet, my long forgotten pair of 3D glasses wasn’t up to the task. I am told that the glasses you use has a huge barring on your experience, so look for your best pair and let us know what you think.”

We hope you got your 3D glasses Vaibhav!

Have you tried out Nokia Maps in true 3D? If not, you can go to maps.nokia.com/webgl and click on the 3D glasses. Let us know what YOU think of our 3D experience!

As we have explained before, the new Nokia Maps Suite brings you the latest version of Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive and the new Nokia Public Transport applications. It also comes with key application shortcuts developed specifically for Nokia Belle so that you can instantly access useful information such as guides, and your current location.

Here is a quick look at the goodies that Nokia Maps Suite brings you:

 Nokia Maps: Now with just a long press on your map, you can access walk, drive and public transit routing, which will guide you to your destination. If you like your maps to be uniquely yours, you can turn on “photos” in the Maps app to see all your geo-tagged pictures from your phone’s gallery placed on your map in the places they were taken. Next time you want to tell someone about a trip you had, just open the map and take them where you want and show them what you saw!

You are at a new neighborhood and want to have lunch? The Places widget will help you to find out what’s around you, or tell you more about your current location, right from your home screen. It will share the reviews from respected guides and reviewers like Lonely Plant, via Michelin, Time Out, Qype and more. You can save the place for another visit, and share the details with your friends as well. And if you are planning to use Nokia Maps in a different country, remember to download the country maps via WiFi so that you can continue enjoying Nokia Maps without worrying about data costs.

Nokia Drive: Even everyday things like getting around by car are improved thanks to a larger, easier-to-view map. A narrower dashboard means a larger map view in landscape mode. So it’s easier to navigate when you’re behind the wheel. The route planner is back by popular demand, letting you create custom routes and start points along with the ability to save favorite routes and sync them between your phone and computer.

For our UK users, new Voice Search lets you get directions simply by speaking, so you can now navigate hands-free! Tap on the microphone icon next to the search box and speak your destination. Voice Search will be available for more countries and languages soon.

We also continue to provide you offline navigation – all you need to do is to download the maps for the country or region via WiFi to enjoy Drive without worrying about data costs.

Public Transport: With the new Nokia Public Transport app, all you need to do is to type out your destination, and you are set to go! The app shows the nearest public transport departures to your destination, so you can choose the one that is the most convenient for you – the app will guide you there. The navigation is literally door-to-door, so you will truly feel like a local even if it is a city that you are visiting for the first time! The app will tell you how to walk up to the right stop, which bus, tram, underground or train to take, which stop you have to get down and will lead you right to your destination. Line information lets you know how many stops you’ll pass along the way. You can even save frequent commutes to your favorites and check departure times for any stop on your route. Currently, we have real-time routing for Berlin; timetable routing for 88 cities across the world, and estimated routing for 420+ cities worldwide.

These are some of the great features that we have as part of the new Nokia Maps Suite. Download the new Nokia Maps Suite directly on your Belle smartphone or via Nokia Store, and let us know what you think of it!

Often I find out about new restaurants and bars when I walk by them or get a recommendation from one of my friends.  This time was different: I discovered Bixels using my Nokia Lumia 800, when I tapped nearby places in Nokia Maps. It turned out to be just a couple blocks away, and Nokia Maps showed me the best way to get there.

A baked potato café may seem a bit strange, but it’s actually a lot of fun. I shared it with some of my friends with Nokia Maps, and we had a really good time. I’ve even added it as a favourite on my smartphone — it’s going to become one of our regular haunts, now — and I might not have found the joint if it wasn’t for my curiosity and the helpful nearby places feature.

How does this work?  For starters, nearby places pulls information from a long list of impressive guides and reviewers like Lonely Planet, TimeOut, Trip Advisor, the AA, WCities and many more. We also look at the reviews, ratings, photos and activity of places that you, our community, add and look at on maps.nokia.com. With all this great content, plus your contributions via maps.nokia.com, combined with a little bit of magic, we can surprise you with a new great places.

We are constantly working on getting more places and making our service better for you and we always love to hear what you think about it.

If you’ve found a great new café for the perfect latte, a new hidden cocktail bar or a special place to share with your loved ones by using nearby places, let us know in the comments.

Surya: Hi Wiebke, can you tell us a bit more about Nokia Maps for Mobile Web?

Wiebke: Of course! Nokia Maps is available for anyone with an HTML5 based browser. This means that you can access Nokia Maps via your iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets and more. All you have to do is to go to m.maps.nokia.com on your mobile browser.

Surya: Lots of our Nokia users wonder why Nokia is providing maps for non-Nokia devices. Do you have something to say to them?

Wiebke: I do. When you go out and find a great brunch place for the weekend, you want to share it with your friends and invite them to join you there. These friends may be using non-Nokia devices but you want them with you on your everyday adventures. Of course it works also the other way around:  your friends find a great place and share it with you using Nokia Maps. Also, the more people use Nokia Maps, the better the map experience becomes for everyone. So even if all your friends are Nokia Lumia fans, you still would ultimately benefit from people using m.maps.nokia.com on their non-Nokia devices.

Surya: Can you tell us a bit more about the share feature?

Wiebke: Sure. With Nokia Maps, you can share a place and all the relevant information that comes with it with your friends and family. You can use Facebook, twitter, email, sms, Google book-marks and local social networks. The shared place can be open in all Nokia Maps applications:  On your Nokia Symbian or Nokia Lumia smart-phones,  HTML5 enabled mobile web browsers with any other device – it’s all Nokia Maps!

Surya: Talking about Nokia Maps, one of the strongest features of the service has been offline navigation. Nokia Maps on Nokia Belle has full offline features, and so does the new Nokia Drive on Nokia Lumia. How about m.maps.nokia.com?

Wiebke: Actually we offer offline capabilities on m.maps.nokia.com as well.  With neighborhood maps you select a part of the map, use WiFi to download the selected area to your device and voila, it is ready for offline use. You can zoom in on the downloaded map area as well. So you go to a café with WiFi, you are enjoying your tea and want to go shopping for shoes next. You do a search on your phone or tablet; find out some shops that you want to check out. You download the map area showing where the shops are, and take them with you – you will get the offline experience on your m.maps.nokia.com for the area that you downloaded. You can search for places, zoom in, and also figure out how much more you have to walk to your destination.

Surya: Is there any difference between m.maps.nokia.com and maps.nokia.com?

Wiebke: The biggest difference is that m.maps.nokia.com is optimized for mobile or tablet browsing, while maps.nokia.com is optimized for a great browsing experience on your computer or laptop. The map data and POI database is the same, and you can have the same search experience, live traffic view and public transport layer on m.maps.nokia.com. There are slight differences in the UI as we wanted to make m.maps.nokia.com the best browser based maps experience for your smartphone. We are very proud of what we did, as it is not easy to provide a unified experience on many different devices.

Surya: Sounds good. Can you tell us a bit more about the idea behind the UI?

Wiebke: Our basic premise is that we are using the map as a canvas to show you all the data and necessary information about your surroundings as needed. We have different layers on our maps to show you different aspects of your surroundings – for example, live traffic flow brings you information about how congested your streets are, while public transport view shows you all the transit stops, and how they are interconnected. As a commuter, there are times when you need this information, and other times you don’t. Rather than overwhelm the user with a lot of data at the same time, we give the user the power to pick and choose from the various options, as they need.

Surya: Talking about commuters, how can someone living in a city like Berlin or London use m.maps.nokia.com on their device?

Wiebke: If you are in an unfamiliar place and just want something to drink, you can just type ‘café ‘on the search bar and you will find many place to choose. You can also use m.maps.nokia.com to find out how to get from A to B. Let us say you are meeting your friends for dinner at a new restaurant in your city. Once you search for the restaurant and click on the route icon, it will show you how to reach your destination by walking, driving or by using public transport.  All three forms of routing provide you with turn-by-turn directions on how to reach your destination, and you can even share your route with your friends.

Surya: And we have something special for walk navigation!

Wiebke: Yes we do! We launched turn-by-turn voice guidance for walk navigation during MWC 2012. We realized that many of our users live in urban environments and use us to find places nearby to them. And in many cities, walking is often the fastest and easiest way if you want to reach a place that is a few blocks away. The users just have to download the Voice file the first time. As long as it is in your mobile browser cache, you can have turn-by-turn, voice guided walk navigation.

Also, I just want to use this time to give a big thank you to all the bloggers who picked up our story and supported us. We were pleasantly surprised and humbled to see the great support pouring in.

Surya: What is in store for m.maps.nokia.com in the future?

Wiebke: I am very excited about our future plans – HTML5 has great potential in developing cross platform solutions and our team is exploring the various options. We would love to hear what our users think about m.maps.nokia.com as well, as it would help us in furthering the mobile web maps story.

Thank you Wiebke for sharing your thoughts with us! If you have a HTML5 browser on your smart device, do try out m.maps.nokia.com and turn by turn walk navigation on it and let us know your thoughts!

Explore great places wherever you are: With the new Nokia Maps, just a tap reveals our 25 most recommended places to eat, drink, and shop in nearly 200 countries, so wherever you are you will find something amazing to experience. The smart search algorithm will bring you the most popular places around you. On top of that, with 50-times as many places nearby, you get more choices and more options for discovering something new—whether at home or half a world away.

Add and edit your favourite places:  Now, we have a feature that many of you requested for Nokia Maps on your Nokia Lumia – you can make your maps more personal, and more useful, by marking any place or address that matters to you as a favourite. Get instant access to the places you visit most often and see your recently searched places so you can pay a second visit to that little hole in the wall, and recommend it to your friends.

Find the best way to get to your destination: Get around your hometown easily and explore anywhere just like a local, with detailed turn-by-turn directions for walking, driving, or using public transport. Just tap the flags to see more information about your route including details on train connections. Nokia Maps provides you door-to-door directions and includes public transport routing for 460 cities around the world. In select markets, live traffic flow updates keep you from wasting time stuck in traffic jams.

Share places and routes with friends: Meet up easier and faster by sharing routes and places with your friends over email, SMS, or social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Setting up impromptu catch up sessions with friends at the latest cool places has never been easier!

Live adventure every day with Nokia Maps: Wherever you are, you can always find great places, explore the best ways to get there, save them as favourites and share them right from your phone to invite your friends to join you. The new Nokia Maps has some great new features that you’ve been asking for. Give them a try today on your Nokia Lumia smartphone –we’d love to hear what you think about them.

If you have already downloaded the new Nokia Maps, let us know your top reasons to use Nokia Maps? If not, download the latest Nokia Maps for your Nokia Lumia phone and let us know what you love the most about it!

Door-to-door navigation makes you feel like a local: Nokia Transport on your Nokia Lumia means that you will be guided from where you are right up to your destination. You no longer have to search for the nearest public transport stop in an unknown place, or wonder how to find your destination from where you get off.  You can commute with confidence, even if you are in a city for the first time, thanks to Nokia Transport.

All you need to know is where you want to go: Don’t know where you are now? Are you a bit lost? Don’t worry, Nokia Transport can find where you are. All you need to use Nokia Transport is the name of the place where you want to go. With predictive search you can simply type in the name of the restaurant that your friends recommended, or the cool art gallery that you just read about in a blog post. Nokia Transport will take you there.

Reliable timetable and real-time routing: For 88 cities around the world, Nokia Transport brings reliable time-table routing.  You will have exact point-to-point routing with timetable, you will know the exact time you will spend in transit, and will know your exact arrival time. You can also decide whether to leave right now, or wait a few minutes and take a different means of transportation. We even have real time routing, which will let you know about transit disruption and delays, currently available for Berlin and Postdam.

Everything at a glance: With the new intuitive visual display of Nokia Transport, you can figure out everything you want in a glance. The different start times, the different routes to your destination, the different modes of transportation – everything is seamlessly represented and easy to understand with Nokia Transport!

Never be lost, wherever you are: With Nokia Transport, 427 cities around the world have estimated routing. On top of this, 88 cities around the world have timetable routing as well. We provide one view for all your commuter data, integrating pedestrian, buses, trains and light rails from 700 + agencies across the world. You may not speak the local language, but you will know how to navigate the public transport network wherever you go!

Download Nokia Transport on your Nokia Lumia today from Windows Marketplace! If you have been already using Nokia Transport, let us know how you use it in your daily life!

Explore the world without worrying about data costs: You want to explore a new region or country that you are visiting, and want to drive around without worrying about data costs or going through the hassle of getting a local SIM card. Or you are in a place where cell reception is spotty at best. Not to worry – all you need to do is use WiFi to download the country or region maps that you are planning to explore, and Nokia Drive’s offline feature will help you.  You can be offline to save data charges, and still find and get to where you need to be. Search for places and addresses or get voice guided turn-by-turn directions to your destination without needing a data connection.

Drive safe and savvy: Sometimes the road stretches ahead, or you are a bit busy, and you forget about the speed limit.  The new Nokia Drive shows you the speed limit of the road you are on, and warns you when you go above the speed limit. You can also adjust the alert settings to fit your needs.

Update your loved ones on when to expect you: “Are we there yet?”  “When will we be there?” If you have driven with a group, you are familiar with these questions. Or you may want to let your friends know when exactly you will arrive at their party. When you drive, you want all the pertinent information at a glance. The new Nokia Drive lets you quickly see your estimated time of arrival, time remaining to destination, and distance to destination. Everything you need to know to make decisions on the road is available to you in a glance.

Recent Destinations: You don’t have to type the addresses all over again.  Now, you have one tap access to your most recent destinations on Nokia Drive. Less time typing, more time exploring!

Always there, wherever you are: Nokia Drive offers coverage in 104 countries across 6 continents, including full China support. So wherever your top 10 places to visit are located, chances are you can download the country or region maps to Nokia Drive, and take a drive along Route 66 or cruise along Champs-Élysées.

So download the new Nokia Drive to your Nokia Lumia and take it out for a spin! If you have already tried out the new Nokia Drive, let us know how you like the experience!

Head over to maps.nokia.com and click on the “Directions” link to open the route planner, then select the Public Transport directions option. As you can see in the image above, now you can enter your preferred date and time of arrival or departure, and you’ll see suggested public transport directions for the times that suit you. This means that if you are visiting Berlin, or one of the 88 cities around the world where we’re able to offer timetable public transport directions, you can plan out your transit routes in advance, and can even print the directions to take them with you or share them online with your travel companions.  What if you don’t know how to get to the station? Not to worry – you will be provided door-to-door walking directions, with turn-by-turn maneuver list, to get you to the station.

In Berlin we have something even better: you can even get live, real-time timetable information. This means that we know exactly where each train and bus is and if it’s late or on time. You’ll never be surprised by a strike, road works, track maintenance or any other delay. You always get the up-to-date, real-time information so you can better plan and live your everyday adventures. What if it’s a sunny day, and you just want to travel by trams, buses and ferries only? You can select or deselect your public transport options and find the route that’s best for your day.

Have you tried out public transport directions on your maps.nokia.com? Give it a try and let us know what you think!

Why, and when, do you use the various features of Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive and Public Transport? We have even got a video from our Indian colleagues to get your creativity fired up! Tell us in a comment below, or on a tweet with #nokiamaps hashtag, and you may stand to win some Nokia goodies!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Have a great weekend full of everyday adventures everyone!

NokNokTv “…found they work really easy straight from the download. It really is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get around.”

RootzWiki zooms into why this is a great idea: “Nokia gives us all a look into what could be the future of mobile device functionality. If you don’t like the app your operating system provides for you, HTML5 apps could offer another option that works well or better with across the board continuity on every OS.” 

NDTV Gadgets explains step-by-step how to get the voice guided navigation activated on m.maps.nokia.com on your HTML5 supported smartphone and tablet.

Technologytell seems to think Nokia’s voice directions are more pleasant to listen compared to some others. ElectricPig says that “It’s impressive stuff given that it’s free” and wonders about the bigger picture. The Technology Cafe has explained m.maps.nokia.com for those who have HTML5 browsers on their smart phones and tablets.

Have you tried out m.maps.nokia.com yet on your iOS or android smartphones and tablets? What do you think? Do let us know!