Google has brought the interactive mapping goodness of Google Maps to your mobile phone.
Google Maps Mobile is a free download with a look and feel just like that of the Google Maps you’ve come to know and love, offering directions, local search, movable maps, and satellite imagery of your location (I’ve been using it for ten minutes and I’m already hooked).
If you’re curious to see if your phone will work with Google Maps Mobile, check out the list of supported devices.
[via LifeHacker]
This is exactly the kind of thing we ought to be seeing more of for mobile phones. A rich client application that I can download once, plus internet connectivity to access vast online databases. I’ve been using this for a week or two now and it works great. It would be nice to add some basic GPS/location based stuff so I could just type “thai” and select “near me” and it would send me in the right direction. I would love a specialized wikipedia viewer like this. I don’t want to have to download 150k of html and CSS and render it on every single page change. I want a dedicated shell of an interface that would know how to retrieve text based data from wikipedia plus some scaled down images if needed. The problem of course is that you have to develop for a set of devices using either Java or the .NET compact framework and then go about testing on fifty different phone types and screen resolutions, etc. But those problems are being addressed and I’m wishing for more of these soon.