If you were a fan of google maps on your mobile phone before you’re going to love it now! The new beta of google maps with my location has been released. I’ve been using this now for a about a week and half and its a great upgrade from the previous version. The new Google Maps with My Location shows where you are in relation to certain destinations on a map by using a blue dot. You may be saying to yourself, “well, i don’t have GPS on my phone so how does it know where I am?”. Well, it doesn’t matter!

The only difference in this new beta regarding GPS enabled phones vs non GPS enabled phones is a larger blue circle. As google says it,

Press “0″ and look for the blue dot :

or

So, if you have GPS google can tell exactly where you are visually represented by the smaller blue dot (above on the left). If you do not have GPS (like myself) you’ll see the blue dot with the lighter blue circle around it (above to the right). Well, when i first saw this circle I really didn’t know what it meant either. But after reading more about it, I’ve learned about how My Location works. Google continues to explains this:

The My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near you to approximate your current location on the map - it’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average). We’re still in beta, but we’re excited to launch this feature and are constantly working to improve our coverage and accuracy.

Google has also made a little video to help further explain the service so you can check it out below:

So far, I’ve really enjoyed this beta product. I’ve used it a number of times and its extremely accurate considering I don’t have GPS. I definitely recommend you try this beta out and you can only expect to see this become more enhanced and more accurate as it nears official launch.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 8:27 am and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.