Google has announced that its Mobile Maps is getting over 100 million unique visitors every month. These are pretty significant numbers for something that we do not hear very much about in the news. Mobile maps has been out for about 5 years and is quite a bit hit. If you have never used it, you should take a look at it. It is great to show you where you are at in a city that you visiting and need to know. I have used it several times in the Los Angeles area to determine the direction I needed to travel.
It is excellent for getting directions from where you are to another location and being on a smartphone makes it very convenient. With the growing use of GPS devices, this is a great substitute for them. If you do not know exactly where you are, you can use the MyLocation feature, which will show you your present location on a map. If you smartphone is GPS enabled, it will use that to show you location on a map. If it is not, it uses the cell towers to get a reference point on where you are, but not as accurate as with GPS.
The great part of this is getting driving directions on your phone, though it is not quite as convenient as a GPS, as smartphones need to get faster processors to handle the heavy graphics. Some of the recently released Android phones are up to the task of handling the processing needs for this, which will put the GPS device industry in trouble. You can get a street view or a satellite view of the map, which uses the same images as what you see on the web with Google maps.
There are many more features available if you happen to have an Android phone. You can download Google Maps Navigation from the Google Android Market, which adds a number of features, such as Search By Voice, Street View (which is also in the normal Google Maps on the web), Traffic View, etc. Traffic view includes showing green, yellow and red indicators of freeways so that you know if there are any issues in the direction that you are going.
We can continue to expect improvements from Google for Mobile Maps to make it better as more and more Android phones hit the markets and additional features are added to the Android Market store. If you have an Android phone and do not have Navigation on your smartphone, you should take a look at it.
Google have been criticised again for harvesting emails, passwords, personal details from open wifi setups while they were trawling for Street View. That was straight-up wrong of them and it’s becoming more difficult to understand what they mean now by ‘do no evil’…