As parts of its MWC announcements Nokia has indicated that the Nokia location apps on Windows Phone (Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Public Transport, Nokia City Lens) will now use the HERE brand that Nokia established last year for its location and mapping services. The Windows Phone apps will now be known as HERE Maps, HERE Drive+, HERE Public Transport, and HERE City Lens.

In addition Nokia is demoing a number of enhancements to HERE Suite on Windows Phone. For example, the Live Sight technology found in City Lens is being added to Maps, and Transit adds a station overview map view. The apps will be more tightly integrated allowing users to seamless transition between the two (e.g. launching Public Transport from Maps). Nokia is also making the HERE Suite available to user of non-Nokia Windows Phone devices in select markets (US, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain).

The HERE apps will be pre-loaded on the new Lumia 520 and 720. The rebranded are now available in the Windows Phone Store for existing Lumia devices: HERE Maps, HERE Drive+, HERE Tranit, HERE City Lens. We'll be looking at the updates in each of these apps in more detail in due course.

During its MWC press conference Nokia also played up the strength of its overall offering, emphasising both the accuracy of map data and feature richness of the HERE Suite.

The HERE experience is built on the world’s most complete and accurate map data based on 25 years of mapping technology leadership. We offer today the only true offline maps experience, the largest indoor map inventory, and the largest public transport coverage of any location service to date.

As we noted last year the HERE brand is about taking Nokia's location and service offering beyond its own products:

A clear strategic imperative of HERE is to be available across multiple host platforms. It's not about any single app, but rather delivering a location platform that will be the backbone for many apps across many platforms. Nokia believe this platform-agnosticism makes HERE stand out from other mapping platforms, but there's a clear commercial imperative.

Nokia believes that the benefits derived from providing a universal location platform is far greater than those that could be derived from using its location assets purely on its own platforms. As part of it commitment to providing HERE across multiple platforms a number of announcements were made.