Monday, July 28, 2008

Have you discovered Google Maps on your mobile yet?

How many of you haven't located your house in Google Earth and exclaimed, "Look! there is my house!". Well, most of us have. Wish you could do the same on your cell phones?

I bought a Nokia N81 recently and was all excited about Nokia Maps which come pre-installed in it. Even though the device does not have in-built GPS, I found the Nokia Maps very useful when it was able to show me the route between any point A and point B that I chose. I couldn't have been happier, or so, I thought.

Meanwhile, I was also aware of Google Maps for Mobile, but the Google disclaimer saying something like 'This is a data intensive application. Make sure that you have an unlimited data plan' would always scare me enough to prevent me from downloading it.

After I got a new GSM connection (and an unlimited GPRS data plan) I finally downloaded Google Maps for Mobile. And when I launched it for the first time after installation, I was quite surprised that it was showing my location with a light blue circle on the map saying 'Your location is within 1800 meters'!! It took me a few seconds to realize that it was actually showing my location based on the location of the cell phone base station (cell phone tower) that it was receiving the signal from. The best part is while your travelling, the blue blinking dot actually follows you so that you can know where exactly you are. Believe me, the accuracy was far better than the displayed 1800m. Well, may be not as good as 10 to 15 m offered by GPS but definitely within 100m (within Bangalore at least). Well, this is more than what I could have asked for from a free (as in freeware) application, I thought, but there was more, you can switch between map mode and satellite image mode. Both the above features (location tracking, in non-GPS phones and satellite image mode) are not available in Nokia Maps.

After reading this post, if you are eager to try Google Maps for Mobile and if you own a smart phone, point your phone's web browser to m.google.com/maps and download the latest version of GMM for your smart phone.