Google Maps is one of the web's best applications. It largely does away with the old PC- or Mac-based route planning tools, and instead lets you browse cities and streets on an ever-expanding map that you can drag and pan around your screen. Better than that, it also includes some of the world's best satellite imagery, allowing you to view the actual lie of the land.
Building this into a portable device such as the iPhone and then streaming it over the web is a stroke of genius, as it allows travellers to quickly swot up on the lie of the land all around them and builds in a whole new level of functionality to the iPhone's core purpose: keeping in touch.
With the arrival of the iPhone 3G, it has been taken one stage further, as you can now use satellite positioning services — so-called GPS — to pinpoint your location, correct to within a few metres for more accurate navigation, and semi-automated route planning.
Browsing
Maps is found on the iPhone Home screen, and each time you launch it, it will pick up from wherever you last left off. The best way to get to know it is to simply browse around. Drag your finger across the screen to pull the map in any direction. After taking a moment to stream the next section from the Internet it will update, to show you the roads in the newlv-uncovered area.
Try zooming in by placing two fingers on the screen and slowly drawing them apart, then do the same in reverse, pinching them together to zoom out.
But street plans are only half of the story. As the Maps application takes its data from Google Maps, it also has access to high resolution aerial photograph}' for much of the world, and this can also be streamed to the iPhone, which can be scrolled, zoomed and searched in exactly the same way. To switch between the two, tap the button in the lower right corner of the interface with the curling paper icon to call up the underlying menu, which lets you pick between map, satellite, hybrid or list and repeat the exercise, dragging and zooming until you are fully au fait with the way it works. Can you imagine anything easier?
If you are wondering what the options other than map and satellite mean, hybrid overlays the maps over the aerial photography so you can sec not only the buildings and geographic features on the ground but also labels showing where they are, while list shows a page of directions derived from a route planning query initiated by tapping the Directions button on the Maps application's opening screen. The hybrid view is particularly clever, as not only does it allow you to re-size the photography while keeping the maps proportionally accurate, but it will also intelligently tailor the amount of information shown on the maps to avoid blotting out the photography when zoomed out.
So, when you are at city level rather than building level it will show only the major arteries instead of every single road, and change the size of the font used to label them so that it remains legible. This way you can use a wide area overview to get yourself to more or less the right location before zooming to a more appropriate scale when you need to start navigating individual roads.
Once you arc happy with manipulating the map, satellite and hybrid views using your fingers, it is time to start using Maps' intelligent scarch features, and integrating them with the iPhone's communications tools.
You can't spend your whole life dragging a map around. It would be like taping together every Ordnance Survey sheet and then carefully folding and re-folding them every time you wanted to look at a different part of the country. It is far better to jump straight to the map you want, in both the paper- and pixel-based worlds, which is where searching comes in.
Tap inside the input box at the top of the screen and the keyboard will pop up, enabling you to enter your search term. This can be very specific or quite general; it understands landmarks as well as addresses. For example, White I louse, Washington DC, will take you straight to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a view that is best seen using satellite imagery rather than the plain old map. Likewise, 30 Cleveland Street, London, UK, will accurately pinpoint the home of Dennis Publishing, at which point we would recommend switching back to the map view {below).
But what if you are out and about and you desperately need a local service? That is when searching with business names comes to the fore. You are in Seattle, the home of coffee, and need a caffeine hit to start the day. Where else would you head, but to the home-grown Starbucks chain. Tap in the search box and type Starbucks, Seattle, WA, and a moment later the map will switch to the downtown Seattle area, and a volley of pins will drop onto the map, each marking out a Starbucks outlet.
Tapping each one brings up its name on an attached tag, on the end of which you will sec a small arrow in a circle, similar to the arrows found on your contacts in the Address Book. Tap an arrow and the map will spin around to reveal that outlet's contact details, giving you the address, phone number, email details, website and other supplementary information. This can either be added to your address book, or used immediately by tapping the phone number to make a call and doing the same to the email and web addresses to send a message or visit the associated site. Just don't be tempted to repeat Steve Jobs' trick of calling his local Starbucks and ordering 4,000 lattes to go for the audience that gathered to view the iPhone's launch.
Sometimes, of course, you don't know the name of the business you want to call, because you don't even know whether it even exists in the town where you are browsing. In these situations, revert to generic business types, such as 'pizza', 'coffee', 'petrol' or 'vet'. The system is surprisingly versatile and acts as a mobile, digital version of the Yellow Pages, where clicking on each entry that it finds will bring up its full record.
Where am I?
An easier way to see exactly where you are, which is particularly handy if you are in the middle of a large city, is to use the self-positioning tool, which works on both the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone, with varying degrees of accuracy. It is simple: tap the target icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen and the map will re-centre and be overlaid with a blue circle. Your position will be within that ring.
The i Phone 3G primarily uses GPS to get a fix on your position, if possible. GPS works by receiving a stream of data from a constellation of satellites orbiting the earth. These satellites transmit a time code and their current position. The receiver — in this case the iPhone — looks at the time codes for each one and compares their accuracy. By working out how much they differ and comparing this with the positional information from each satellite, it can work out how long it took the time codes to reach it from each satellite, and thus how far away the receivers are. When it has a fix on two or more satellites (the more the better)
it can then draw a virtual line from each one, and where they converge will always be its position.
If the iPhone can't get a perfect fix on the satellites, perhaps because of cloud cover, trees overhead or the fact that it is inside a building, it augments this information with supplementary information received from the cellphone network and - in the US - from various public wifi networks. Together these provide supplementary triangulation information that enable it to estimate your current location. This same technology works on the original iPhone, which lacks the GPS-receiving hardware.
Route planning
Searching is only half of the story, though. It is no good finding a coffee shop you want to visit if you don't then know how to get there. Perform the Seattle Starbucks search we outlined above, click on Directions From Here, and the display will revert to a dimmed version of the map, overlaid by the route-planning box and keyboard. The cursor will be positioned in the End box, so type Space Needle and tap Route to have Maps work out the most logical connection between the two.
As we are searching for a route between two American locations, tapping the car icon in the lower-right corner will bring up traffic information, colouring routes travelling at 50mph or faster green, 25-50mph in yellow, and slower than 25mph red. At present, this docs not work on UK route planning.
If you need to travel between two towns rather than starting from or ending up at a point of interest you have already found, you need to use the more traditional route-planning tools. Let's imagine we are visiting Devon and Cornwall for a few days, we have just arrived at Plymouth and want to get to the Eden Project. Tap the double-ended arrow in the bottom-left corner of the screen to call up the route-planning boxes and, in the Start box, type Plymouth railway station, UK, then Next to move to the End box and type Eden Project, Cornwall, as your destination. Tap Route and let Google Maps find the best route for you. Unless a new set of roads has been built since this book was published, Maps will pull up a 36-mile route that can be driven in 56 minutes and show an overview of the route, picked out in blue, with a pin at the origin.
You can zoom in and out of this in the usual way by pinching or stretching your fingers on the screen, and switch between map and satellite views. More useful in the car, though, is the plain-English instructions. Tap List and the map view flips round to reveal the directions you need to follow to get to the Eden Project in the projected time.
The next step is only recommended if you have a passenger who can help you navigate: as you set off, tap die first direction on the list and the display will revert to the map view, zoomed to each instruction, which will then be surrounded by a light purple circle for clarity. The instruction is repeated at the top of the screen. (Clicking on Start on the overview screen would have got you to the same point here, although without being able to preview the route.)
As soon as you have passed that first checkpoint, have your navigator tap the right-hand arrow beside the instruction to call up the next one, and watch as the map updates to show the layout of the next junction. Repeat this the whole way until you arrive at your destination.
There is a neat trick for home time. Tap the List button to return to the instructions, then hit Edit at the top of the screen. This calls up the keyboard so you can re-enter your departure and destination points, but rather than type them in from scratch, tap the double-ended wavy arrow on the left, which will swap the contents of the Start and End boxes, leaving you nothing more to do than click on Route.
Tracking your progress
The GPS receiver in the iPhone 3G turns on and off automatically to minimise its impact on battery life. However, by using it when following directions you can monitor your progress along a planned route, with directions changing as you reach key points. On the original iPhone, routing instructions are accompanied by forwards and backwards arrows that, when tapped, progress the instructions by one step each time, zooming the map in and out to move between each one.
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