Good to see Nokia porting some of their newer Maps Suite back to fill out the mapping and navigation options on older devices, with today's new v2.0.3 beta release of Nokia Public Transport for all Symbian touch-driven smartphones, including now for the first time S60 5th Edition and (also, some) pre-Belle Symbian^3 smartphones. New for this release are visual improvements, coverage information and extra language localisations.

From the Nokia Beta Labs post, here's what's new for this beta release:

In Nokia Public Transport 2.0.3:

1. Line information: all the intermediate stops in your journey.
2. Journey details with visual improvements: specific brand icons, colours and more.
3. New Stations Nearby with renewed Departures.
4. Walking navigation with the help of Nokia Maps, walk from and to a transport station.
5. Coverage flow at the first time usage. This flow will help the user to understand what type of coverage is supported in the user's detected location.
6. App is localised: the app is now localised in about 50 languages.

Besides, the app is now supported in many different cities around the globe:

With accurate timing information: Atlanta, Auckland, Austin, Baltimore, Barcelona, Berkshire, Berlin & Brandenburg, Boston, Budapest, Chicago, Dallas, Denmark, Denver, Edmonton, Flanders, Halifax, Helsinki, Honolulu, Houston, Las Vegas, London, Miami-Dade county, Minneapolis & Saint Paul, New York City, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, Toronto, Turin, Wellington and Winnipeg.

We also offer worldwide estimated routing information, which uses map data to calculate a heuristic route, based on the likely frequency of lines. Check out the list of cities where estimated routing is available.

For more coverage of Maps Suite 2.0 and its functionality, see our original story on the February (v2.0 beta) update.

Installation takes a while (many minutes) and requires up to 10MB of internal storage space. For S60 5th Edition and ^3/Anna users, there's also a new version of Nokia's Qt Smart Installer, somewhat confusingly - just say yes to everything and wait.... and wait....

The upshot is that in a large number of cities worldwide, S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3/Anna users get public transport routing and advice, with accurate timing if they live in one of the cities listed above.

Here's the main download page. 

Shown above are the initial coverage screen (for my city, Reading) and version information, from the Nokia E6.

Here's Public Transport 2.0.3 in action on the S60 5th Edition-powered Nokia X6:

Again, credit to Nokia for not forgetting about Symbian smartphones on older versions of the OS. Part of this is down to Qt itself, of course, with most S60 5th Edition phones being able to run Qt apps. (Though N97 owners will struggle, as usual, because of the limited system disk space)

Comments welcome, especially if you have an older phone that's suddenly become an indispensable pedestrian and public transport aid...