During Nokia CEO Stephen Elop's opening Nokia World 2011 presentation, one of the new Nokia apps mentioned a lot was Public Transport. Built with commuters in mind, Public Transport helps users plan journeys, search for locations and eliminate guess work from travelling. Read on to find out how, and for some hands-on photos of Public Transport in action, and a first glimpse of the app on Nokia Windows Phone.

Think of Public Transport as a smart journey planner that fits in your pocket, designed to take some of the hassle out of commuting, and save you time. Public Transport has two main features: a Journey planner and Stations nearby and the ability to search for desired locations.

Check out the Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Drive

Just like journey planners available online, Public Transport lets you type in the name of your destination while it plans a number of available routes. The benefit of Public Transport is its ease of operation when using it.

From our hands-on, searches appeared to be either near-instant, or took just a few seconds to appear. Each route is constantly fed with up to date information, with all the latest timings taken from regional transport organisations. In our case, all the latest journey times were influenced by up to date data from Transport for London.

The data comes in most useful when using Public Transport's Stations Nearby feature. Activating the feature reveals a list of the closest train stations and bus stops, along with timetables for each, and the amount of time in minutes that they will take to arrive at the platform of bus stop.  

While the times are not quite real-time, they are about as close as you can get to being so, a Nokia spokesman said. At the moment only Berlin users have real-time updates, so you never know, live updates could spread to otter territories.

Nokia Public Transport is currently available for all touchscreen Symbian Nokia  devices, and is expected to arrive on Nokia Windows Phone's in due time.

Luckily we got to play with a semi-working version of the app on a Nokia Windows Phone. When the Nokia Lumia 800 and Nokia Lumia finally arrive next month, the Public Transport will still be in beta, but is expected to push on for a full release in early 2012, a Nokia spokesperson told us.

That said, Public Transport for Nokia Windows Phone already will look stunning when it arrives. Menus appear bright, clear and easy to navigate with a swipe of the hand, and symbols to indicate underground and overground trains were distinctly coloured to work on a quick glance basis for those times when you might be in a rush.

You can check out hands-on photos of Public Transport for touchscreen Symbian phones and Windows Phone below in our gallery below: