The mobile blogosphere was abuzz today with the news that Google’s released a version of Google Maps for Mobile that supports the internal GPS of the Nokia N95 and other S60 phones. I love Google Maps for Mobile, it’s definitely one of my all-time top mobile apps, and it’s helped me out on numerous occasions. This update sounds fantastic for people with compatible handsets.
But there’s one feature I would love to see supported that would make this app even better for me: support for the “My Maps” function of Google Maps on the web. I discovered this feature accidentally a little while back, and I use it a lot now — especially when I travel, when mapping software and services are their most valuable. For instance, I was up in the California wine country last week, and I created a map with a bunch of different restaurants and wineries and our hotels saved to it. I was able to print this map, and a list of the bookmarks and their addresses, out easily. The problem was that the map covered such a wide area that it was really useful only as a rough guide; I still had to punch specific addresses in to a GPS unit to get usable directions.
It would have been great to be able to access this map I made directly from the mobile application, and allowing users to create their own personal maps and access them would be a great boon for the service. So if anybody from Google’s listening…
Carlo, thanks for pointing that out. Google Maps is indeed a nice app.
I wanted to mention that we recently made an N95 version of WHERE available to our developer community. WHERE provides functionality similar to MyMaps, so people can publish KML and other content to GPS-capable mobile phones.
And since WHERE is also ‘on-deck’, any apps built on WHERE can be automatically ported to dozens of handsets on carriers that support aGPS (assisted GPS).
Matt
I expect My Maps to be THE platform to consume location aware services