14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Foursquare announced a new flavor of its Windows Phone 8 application, one that arrived on Nokia’s Lumia smartphones with a series of exclusive features, and the company took its time to provide some more details on them.
The latest Foursquare release arrived on devices as the result of a collaboration between Nokia, Microsoft and Foursquare, and provided a nice range of enhancements to all Windows Phone 8 users, but Lumia owners had the most to gain from installing it.
“On Nokia Lumia smartphones, such as the Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 720, you can search for venues around you by switching to augmented reality mode by tapping on the map that sits across the top of the screen and then pressing the camera icon at the top,” a recent post on Nokia Conversations explains.
The application also takes advantage of the augmented reality capabilities of Lumia devices, thus showing on the screen what’s in front of the user by taking advantage of a smartphone’s camera viewfinder.
“This helps you discover new places by providing you with real visual information, such as the exact location of the venue. Is it in front of you, or behind you? This method of checking-in helps,” said blog post explains.
As soon as the user taps one of these icons, specific info on the venue is provided, thus also offering the possibility to check in with a simple click.
Furthermore, the new flavor of the mobile application was designed to take advantage of another appealing feature of Microsoft’s operating system, namely speech integration.
“This latest version of Foursquare is the first version to offer checking-in and searching of venues by using just your voice. If you want to go handsfree, you now can,” the aforementioned blog post explains.
Additionally, there’s the option to check in using the NFC function of all Nokia Lumia Windows Phones 8 smartphones, by tapping the phone against a NFC-enabled tag, provided that the venue has one.
“And, of course, no location-aware app would be complete without the most advanced mobile location platform offering 20 years mapping experience – powered by HERE platform. When you look at the map within Foursquare, it’s reassuringly familiar and runs effortlessly to provide you with pinpoint accuracy,” the blog post continues.
The latest flavor of Foursquare for Windows Phone 8 can be found on this page on Softpedia.