Smarter than your average Barra
Every now and then Google runs an ‘open house' where journalists get to visit Google Towers UK and hear about some of the groovy things it's up to. Yesterday's event focused on its latest mobile products.
It was our first visit to Google Towers and, in terms of new-media, dotcom grooviness, we weren't disappointed; there was all the post-modern furniture, break-out rooms and primary colours you could hope for. Our host was Hugo Barra, director of mobile products at Google.
Barra started by trotting out a few recently announced milestones: over 80,000 apps in the Android Market, 100 million active Google Maps users. And it was with Google Maps that the coolest stuff was launched yesterday - specifically: walking navigation and smart navigation on Streetview.
Walking navigation is simply the addition of text-to-voice to the walking directions that have been available for a couple of years. The main purpose of it, we suppose, is to free you from constantly having to look at your phone while you walk and thus avoid bumping into lamp-posts, falling down man-holes and other such Chaplin-esque larks.
Smart navigation on Streetview is very clever. You can access Streetview easily from a Google Map simply by long-pressing any part of the map. It now gives you the option of moving a little pegman around the picture you're looking at in order to advance the image to that point. The smart navigation even recognises the sides of buildings and we can confirm it work on our Android 2.1 phone. Here's a vid.
