Google Earth has made its triumphant debut on iPhone, providing a touch sensitive way to navigate the entire planet from the palm of your hand. A couple of sweet features include the use of iPhone's accelerometer, allowing pan and tilt of landscapes along with viewing a nice a collection of 8 million geo-tagged Panoramio photos. A useful feature that helped me find the bronze statue of Jimmy Hendrix on the corner of Pine & Broadway in Seattle's infamous Capitol Hill neighborhood. Geo-tagged Wikipedia articles are also included so anyone can explore the earth with a virtual encyclopedia and compass in hand.
I tried locating the Space Needle from the Jimi Hendrix statue and found Google Earth to be spot on, methodically making its way over to downtown Seattle without too much lag time. The ability to instantly tilt and pan over to the horizon to view the landscape has some authentic wow factor.
Like several other iPhone apps, the 'location' feature is a very useful tool. I found Google Earth to have instant cool factor that can wear off fast if you're not in the mood for playing 'Dora The Explorer'. This app on 3G was a tad slow, crashing several times, especially during use of the Panoramio photos. When I switched my iPhone over to WiFi the experience was less frustrating. Restarting my 16GB iPhone 3G did not seem to help matters. I'm sure updates will improve the experience.
Overall, Google Earth is an impressive free app that will take some time to navigate well and equal patience when roaming around the planet. Traveling the world has never been easier. A few failed attempts should be expected along the way, but the spectacular views are so worth the effort. Chime in with comments on your first impressions. Earth to iPhone users! Hello?
This looks great! Amazing. Makes you wonder what's next...
Posted by: Stop Smoking | October 27, 2008 at 11:42 AM