In July, Nokia announced that it would announce a version of its popular HERE mapping and navigation app for Android platform, limited only to the licensed partners, starting with Samsung. Towards the end of last week an APK for the beta version of HERE, labeled as 1.0, was posted to MediaFire and noticed by a Spanish language Android dedicated site El Android Libre. The app seems to run with any Android device which runs on or higher than Android 4.0.
The app looks stuffed with all the regular mapping and navigation options, including turn-by-turn directions and a satellite map layer. The best advantage of HERE maps is that it can download cached maps of full cities and regions for usage in offline mode, thankfully this feature is also included in the Android version. Users need to sign up for a Nokia HERE account in order to use it on their respective devices. They can select the city maps by country; The larger is country, the deeper will be the map data.
Select areas of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia, and Oceania are also available. There is a basic support for bookmarks and search function and performance in the debut edition of this app seems somewhat slower than Google Maps.
As already been made clear by Nokia which implies that the general Android launch of HERE will be initially exclusive to Samsung hardware only, including features that sync with smart watches. The app will soon be listed on Samsung’s Galaxy Apps store.
