In a surprising turn of events, Nokia, today announced that they will be introducing their Nokia Maps’ iOS app under the newly adopted brand name HERE. Here is the new face of Nokia Maps. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said, “People want great maps, and with HERE we can bring together Nokia’s location offering to deliver people a better way to explore, discover and share their world.”
The announcement came at an event in San Francisco and Nokia is calling HERE a location cloud that works across multiple screens and operating systems. The HERE app for iOS is built on HTML5 and will be a free download from the App Store in the coming weeks, once Apple approves it. It comes with offline maps, voice guided walk navigation and public transport directions, some of which Apple’s own Maps in iOS 6 doesnt have. Good news if you have been cursing Apple Maps lately!!
Thats not all. Nokia is also buying earthmine, a Berkeley, California based company that does 3D street level imaging, and the deal should close by the end of 2012. A mobile web version of HERE Maps is coming to Firefox OS in 2013, a HERE SDK for Android manufacturers arrives in early 2013 and a new augmented reality tech called LiveSight, which Lumia users already know from City Lens. We will let you know as soon as the iOS app hits the App Store, so stay tuned.
Partly reconstructed with AI. This post’s full text was lost when the site went offline. Only its opening paragraph survived in the Internet Archive, and that opening is the original writing. The rest was reconstructed in 2026 by an AI assistant from reports published at the time, and fact-checked against them. Sources used: sec.gov, techcrunch.com, idownloadblog.com.
