by wildcherry on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google’s blog announces that Google Maps Navigation will be available in Android 2.0. The first mobile phone that comes with Android 2.0 is Motorola Droid. “This new feature comes with everything you’d expect to find in a GPS navigation system, like 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance and automatic rerouting. But unlike most navigation systems, Google Maps Navigation was built from the ground up to take advantage of your phone’s Internet connection.” And unlike other navigation systems, it’s free.

For now, Google Maps Navigation is only available for the US, but it will certainly be available in other countries when Google collects enough mapping data.

Here’s what you need to know about Google Navigation(from Gizmodo)

• What’s getting it: It’s Android OS 2.0 only for now. And will be available when devices like that ship. (Google demo’d the app to us on a Droid, FWIW.) Other platform support will be announced “by carriers and phone makers” when they’re ready, but Google implied they are working closely with Apple now on it.
• How you tell it where to go: Addresses are input by either text or voice (using the same tech as in the iPhone’s Google mobile app). But the app can take things like business names and restaurant types as well as soft queries like “that museum that has the King Tut exhibit” and return a list of suggested locations
• Traffic handling: The traffic data, as on Google Maps, is driven by multiple sources. Typically, this means data could be from local road authority services like the Bay Area’s Caltrans department’s highway cameras and services like Inrix, but also from cellphones using Google Maps.
• Price: It’s free, and there are no ads. There’s nothing like it in Apple’s App Store that’s less than $25 bucks a year.
• Turn-by-turn voice: There’s only one English-speaking voice at the moment, but it does to text-to-speech, reading street names out loud.
• Does it work offline? Sort of. Maps cache along your intended route, so even if your connection dies along the way the route will still show you what you need to see, and text-to-speech voice synthesis of street names still works, too.
• Maps that never age: Like most cloud map services, you’ll never need to update your map data, but you have to download route maps every time you head out (so you need cell service at the starting point).
• Unique views: It has satellite view, which is super cool for context on the street, but also, it has Street View. When you’re supposed to turn, Street View images come up, overlaid with arrows. Same thing happens at your final destination. Since Street View images have metadata on direction faced and position, Google Maps Navigation intelligently draws the arrows where you’re supposed to go. Sort of.
• Traffic UI: The traffic icon is simple—green, yellow and red according to flow of traffic, with your time of arrival next to the symbol. If you click on the traffic icon, the map zooms out to show congestion points along your route.
• Multi-destination routing? There’s no way to setup multiple stops to help you plan a day’s drive to many locations. But you can search for locations (gas, eateries) along your route, and those results will show up on the map as long as they’re within a radius that moves long your path. You can also pre-determine your stops, and quickly queue up the next when you reach each destination.
• Navigate to point on map: You can tell it to navigate to a location by spotting it on a map and holding your finger down on that point.
• OS integration: You can bookmark locations as icons on your Android phone’s home page.

Tags: Google Maps, google navigation, googlemapsnavigation, GPS, maps navigation, mobile, navteq, tele atlas