HERE transit for series 40: a location based application for public transport on feature phones

Familiar to high-end smartphones users around the world, location based applications are scarce or even unseen on major low-end feature phones. There are many reasons for that, such as, lack of developers interest on those platforms, absence of location-aware hardware, low rate of mobile data plans adoption by its users, difficulties to develop for low-end devices and poor hardware specifications to handle a fast and informative application with complex data.

Even though some of those problems could not be addressed by an application developer, HERE Transit aims to tackle the user interface, performance and data usage issues to deliver a full, smartphone-level public transport application to Nokia Series 40 (and potentially other J2ME-based platforms) 1.5 billion devices around the world.

The application has three major use cases: Journey planner, nearby stations search and off-line journeys.

"Journey planner" takes the user from an origin point (user's current position or informed by the user) to a chosen destination, in any given time in the past or future (provided there is data for that). The application queries the HERE Transit back-end REST API for information on routes and display them to the user (Fig. 1a). From there, the user could take a number of actions such as look for details (Fig. 1b), see section maps (Fig. 1c) or save a route for later (off-line) usage.