The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Google Earth now available for iPhone

Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 9:49 PM

(cross-posted from the Official Google Mobile Blog)

The world just got a little bit smaller. Google Earth is now available for the iPhone and iPod touch, allowing you to fly to the far reaches of the world from the palm of your hand. Since we launched Google Earth for the desktop in 2005, we’ve had over 400 million unique downloads, and people from around the world have used it to view their house, research travel destinations, learn how to make the world a better place, find local businesses, and view geo-located photos. Now, with a free download from the iTunes App Store, you can fly through the same 3D immersive world of Google Earth you’ve come to love, without having to fire up your desktop computer.

Check out this video tour to see Google Earth for iPhone in action:

Not only is having Google Earth on your iPhone convenient, but the touch interface is a very natural way to interact with the Earth. Just swipe your finger across the screen and you fly to the other side of the globe; tilt your phone and your view tilts as well. You can pinch to zoom in or out, or just double tap with one finger to zoom in and two fingers to zoom out. We also integrated the My Location feature, so with a touch of a button, you can fly to where you are in the real world on your phone. In addition, we have over eight million Panoramio photos, which are geo-located photos of places, and you can view any and all of them from your iPhone. Besides being beautiful, high-quality pictures, they’re specifically of places, so you don’t have to see some guy’s family on vacation in Thailand–you can see the beaches, the temples, all the things that give you a real sense of the place. Here is a nice shot of the Grand Palace that I found on my virtual tour of Bangkok:

Google LatLong: Google Earth now available for iPhone.

From the Google GMail Blog:

Introducing Gmail for mobile 2.0

Thursday, October 23, 2008 10:00 AM

As an engineer on the Gmail for mobile team, I use the Gmail client on my mobile phone all the time. Because of this, I’m always looking for ways to make it faster, more robust and easier to use. Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Gmail for mobile version 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. Our focus for this version was to make the experience faster and more reliable. We rearchitected the entire client to push all the processing to the background, greatly improve the client-side caching scheme and optimize every bottleneck piece of code we came across.

Read more at the  Official Google Mobile Blog: Introducing Gmail for mobile 2.0.

Here is their video introducing v2 of Gmail for Mobile:

Breaking news about Google’s GMail, it’s updates and enhancements can be found at the GMail Blog

If you like to keep your finger on the GMail pulse then this is a great place to start.