Google maps 3.0, Latitude and Voice Recognition Search! Wow!
I’m happy to say, I just received a trifecta of updates on my T-Mobile G1! That’s right; Google latitude, voice recognition search and maps 3.0. It happened today around 5:30 pm cst when I was walking Bert the wiener dog. I noticed a pop up notification that read something to the effect of “system updates are now available for your phone”. I selected “ok”, and then an image of G1 popping out of a box appeared with a yellow progress bar at the bottom. After about 2 minutes, the update was complete and an odd picture of what looked like a microchip appeared. I’m not sure what the meaning of the microchip pic was but it had me confused. At first, I was like, is that a picture of a SIM card? Do I need to remove my SIM and put it back in??? Nonetheless, the picture went away after about 1 minute and then the phone rebooted.
Here are my initial thoughts regarding the new features.
Google Maps 3.0: honestly, not much changed with the exception of latitude. The user interface looks the same as before.
Latitude: In short, very cool feature, but it has some bugs. As previously stated, when I received the update, I was out walking my dog, which means, I happened to be in an open area. Consequently my GPS location was very accurate. Now that I’m in my house the location is not nearly as accurate but still pretty close! Although, for some reason, my location icon just started skipping around google maps and showed that I was in the middle of a lake near my house haha! I hit the menu key, selected “my location” and brought me back to my house. My assumption would be that when the GPS is weak it defaults to cell tower triangulation which is why it showed my location in the middle of the lake. My preference would be to locate by GPS only but, I suppose that leaves out all the folks that don’t have a GPS enabled phone. I haven’t tried tracking any friends yet because unfortunately, they haven’t received the update. But, I imagine their accuracy will be hit or miss, much like my experience. Oh, almost forgot, if you have a gChat account you’re profile picture is defaulted as your latitude pic. In summary, awesome feature! Thanks Google! Now, if Google could come up with a way to track Bert!!!
Voice Recognition: I heard about this feature earlier this week and man was I excited! Now that I have it on my phone, I’m even more excited! Sure it has some kinks but it’s obvious that voice recognition has come a long way. I tried several searches and received mixed results but all in all I thought it did very well. For simple phrases, such as “blockbuster video Dallas, TX” the results were spot on. However, for more complicate phrases such as “Froogloid” the results weren’t so accurate. Maybe I shouldn’t use invented words! Ha! I tried searches for some of my favorite sites such as Texas start up blog, Dallas wakeboarding, and tech crunch and each search returned a perfect match! All in all I’m very impressed and I will certainly use this feature, especially when I’m on the go. One suggestion Google, recognize “Froogloid”, we have feelings too! J Here’s a screenshot…
In case you’re wondering, cupcake (aka on screen keyboard) was not included in the update. I’m not sure when it will be released.
What have your experiences been? We’d love to hear about it!
