How to use Commute in Here Drive+

After Nokia announced the availability of Here Drive+ & Here Transit Apps for all Windows Phone at affordable pricing, the updates have gone live and available in most countries. I can confirm that the update is available for Germany and India, so it must have already hit the US and UK markets.

Today when I updated, it first kept crashing, but a reinstall fixed that issue. It seems many things have changed, and a simple update isn’t working. Since you will use your Nokia Account to get back your favorites and have maps offline, I will highly recommend reinstalling the app.

So coming back to the topic, What is new in Here Drive+. Surprisingly it feels completely new because of the My Commute feature, which is enabled for 26 countries worldwide, along with traffic details.

My Commute Feature:

If you regularly travel from one destination to another, Home to Work and back Home, this commute feature is bliss for users who travel by car. Here Drive+ now comes with personalized commute assistance. The best part of using My Commute is to find if the route is busy and help you with an alternate route for travel. I will suggest installing guided help to make it even better.

Setting up Commutes:

Launch the application and slide up. This will display a list of options that can be used with the Drive+.

Set Destination, Recent Destinations.
Favorites, My Commutes.

Select My Commutes, and you should see an option that says New Commute. Tap and set your source and destination. During these steps, you can choose to give a name of your choice, which makes more sense to you.

When selecting the location, you have the option to pick up from your Favorites, Recent Searches, My Location, or Manual search. If a location is already made favorite by you and your name is set, you will see that name along with the address on the sidelines. Next is to set your time, i.e., When you start from the source and head back to the source.

Once these steps are complete, you will get an option to pin it to the start screen as Live Tile. This is useful because you can find the travel time along with traffic details right there.

How does the Live Tile Work with Commute?

Now instead of pinning down each commute, you have a single live tile for Commute. This can be pinned from Main app -> settings -> myCommutes -> Live tile (which is a link here). The tile shows information about the next upcoming commute, i.e., and it’s time-based.

Change According to your location:

When you open the My Commute section, you will get two views—one that displays all the commutes and the second displaying the next possible commute. So if you have set up your commute between Office and Home, while you are at Office, it will show commute details to Home and vice versa with traffic details. You can call a mini-view where you get to see a progress bar with patches at certain sections. These are sections where your traffic is almost stagnant.

Other Features:

That said, there are some new features that I have noticed in the Here Drive+.

Apart from choosing 2D and 3D map views, now you also have North Up. This helps in keeping the direction sense clear.

Quick access to save current location, internet connection, settings, Feedback, and about.
You may choose to turn off the Internet connection for Here Drive+. When you do that, features like Traffic Updates and My Commute will not work. You can still use Offline Navigation.

Thanks, Mark, for helping me with some of the details I had mentioned above.