14 DAY TRIAL // Internet giant Google has just announced the availability of a new flavor of its Google Maps application for handsets running under the Android operating system, with a nice range of improvements brought to Places and Latitude.
Google Maps 5.8 for Android comes with the possibility to upload photos to a place, or to access the My Places section, and it also offers descriptive terms for Places in search results.
So as to offer users the possibility to see how a place looks like before going to it, the new flavor of Google Maps enables users to upload photos to places they visited.
“You can now contribute photos to help others get a sense of places. You can now attach your photos to Places, and yours may even become the profile picture for that page,” Benjamin Grol, product manager, Google, notes in a blog post.
In addition to being able to upload photos, users will also have the opportunity to delete those photos that they added to Places. A “Photos for Google Maps” album in the Picasa account will enable photo management.
“In June we announced descriptive terms and ‘My Places’ for the desktop. Both these features are now in Google Maps for mobile,” Benjamin Grol explains.
“Descriptive terms appear in search results for Places to inform you what businesses are ‘known for,’ such as their ‘eggs benedict’ or being 'worth the wait'.”
At the same time, he notes that My Places for mobile offers fast access to starred and recent Place pages. To access My Places, users will simply have to press the menu button of the phone when in Google Maps.
Another new feature in Google Maps 5.8 is the option to add a new place while on the go as long as one is available to check into.
Provided that there are new businesses that have not set up a Places page as of yet, this option should prove quite useful. The “Add place” option will emerge at the bottom of suggested places.
“Select that option, and you’ll be prompted to confirm the name and location of the new place. Then a brand new place is added (and you’re checked in). This place will be available for you and others to check into from Latitude, but will not appear as a search result in Google Maps or Google Places,” the blog post continues.
Other changes in the new flavor of Google Maps includes the ‘Bigger text’ option added to the experimental Labs features, in addition to having the ‘Download map area’ option renamed to ‘Pre-cache map area.’
The new Google Maps 5.8 for Android app version is available for download via the Android Market here. It can be installed on any device running under Android OS 2.1 or higher.
