As with the recent baseline street map updates, Nokia's Symbian users continue to benefit from the work put into increasing mapping resources for the company's wider platform ambitions (e.g. HERE, Windows Phone, Asha). In this case, at some point recently, coverage of far more cities was introduced at the server end, with most major towns around me in the UK now covered for bus and train routes. Screenshot proof below - I'd love comments from others on how well Nokia Public Transport now works in other countries around the world.

Note that, in order to see the new cities and towns around you, the last official release of Nokia Maps Suite will be enough (with Public Transport v2.1), but that in order to see transit timings and most fine detail, you will have to install the Nokia Beta Labs v2.5 release of Nokia Public Transport. So go and do that now.

With that in place, here's what I now see:

In the v2.5 version, there's 'covered cities', showing the degree of granularity in coverage now (the v2.1 release merely had an (out of date) list of random cities that were initially covered). Again, you need to be on v2.5. (Right) coverage for my home town of Reading - woohoo!

Nokia Public Transport's databases on the Nokia servers now include several other local towns (Slough, Harrow) and doutbless coverage is being added on the server all the time. (Right) browsing departures from my local stop - for some obscure reason some of the times are doubled. Does this happen for you?

I doubt Symbian users were top priority for Nokia's maps teams, so being able to inherit this common data is pretty cool - and genuinely useful in the real world. Even if most users out in the wider world beyond AAS won't know about the v2.5 app update and so won't see all the data. Nokia (or Accenture) really needs to push out the new application to all via the Nokia Store or 'Software Update'/Nokia Suite. Anyone able to comment officially on this?

Again, comments welcome from users around the world as to how well (or badly) your own country or region is covered.