Nokia City Lens Helps You Discover Your Neighborhood

Nokia has just released Nokia City Lens on the Marketplace. City Lens is a location based augmented reality app for the company's range of Lumia phones. The app allows you to discover places of interests around your area by displaying a floating directory on screen which moves as you pan your phone around in front of you. With three display modes, the app aims to make it easier for Lumia users to find restaurants, entertainment centers, transport, hotels, and more.

When using City Lens for the first time, users may be prompted to calibrate the compass on their phone by making a figure eight motion until it orients the compass properly. If the compass is already calibrated using the Maps app, it won't ask you to recalibrate. It will then display a tile of categories to choose from. Whichever tile you choose, you will have three modes to perform your search.

Placing the phone in a landscape orientation in front of you will open the camera and overlay labels on the screen to show places around you with directions, distance, and ratings. The phone will show you a more traditional list of the venues instead if you hold it vertically. If you hold it flat on its back, it will display a map with location markers.

Tapping a venue brings you to the venue's page in the app that shows a small map to the place, directions, and a phone number. There's also a section for photos and another for reviews but for just about every place we checked out, they're all still empty and there's no way to add photos or reviews of your own, which makes us wonder where Nokia gets its data from. We've asked some of our friends at Nokia Indonesia and hope to have an answer soon.

You can pin venues to the home screen or share the link through email, text message and social networks.

While the app is already live on the Marketplace, you're going to have to search for it manually because for some reason it hasn't made its way to the Nokia Collection, nor is it in App Highlights. At this time, the app is also not yet available from windowsphone.com. We don't expect this app to be available for Windows Phones not made by Nokia but you can certainly try to look for it.

[Update] We've been informed by Nokia's Anvid Erdian that the data for locations and places of interest comes from Navteq, the same Navteq that's responsible for the maps. Additionally, photos and reviews are being crowdsourced from Nokia Maps users.