Danny Gorog30 October 2008, 3:49 PM
Google Earth for iPhone and iPod Touch lets you carry the globe around in your pocket. But while the Earth has been around for billions of years, this app hasn't, and it shows.
Ever felt like carrying the earth around in your pocket? Well, if you've got an iPhone or iPod Touch, now you can, with Google Earth app for iPhone.
Google Earth for iPhone, while not as full powered as the desktop app, is pretty close replica, and really demonstrates the graphical power that Apple have packed in to the mobile version of OS X and the iPhone platform.
With the iPhone app, you get all the same global imagery and 3D terrain as in the desktop version, plus Google has integrated 8 million Panoramio photos, links to Wikipedia articles, and the ability to search for businesses with Google Local Search (provided by TrueLocal in Australia).
Google Earth for iPhone also takes advantage of the iPhone's multi-touch capabilities for browsing. You can, for example, use your finger to flick around the earth, use the pinch movement to zoom and actually tilt the iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain, although in my testing this control was a little rough.
Earth is also location aware. You click on the icon in the lower left hand corner and Google Earth will locate you. This is no small feature -- having GPS built into the Google Earth for iPhone means it's easy to see a satellite view of wherever you are, something that's not really possible with the desktop version of the app.
To write this piece I spent a bit of time with Earth for iPhone, and my first impressions are that this app is still strictly in beta. Performance on the iPhone was at best described as OK, but each session I played with Earth ended up with a hard crash. The zooming and panning was rough and jumpy, and as I described above, the tilt feature gets confused too easily.
While Earth will likely mature to become an impressive iPhone app, I wonder why Google invested the time in bringing this app to the iPhone platform over a native version of other apps, like Gmail for example?
I think apart from being a great iPhone app, Google Earth speaks volumes about Google's current iPhone strategy which can be best be described as 'luke warm'. Although Google has arguably built more for iPhone (especially on the web side of things) than any other type of phone, it will be interesting to see how strong its commitment to other mobile platforms remains once its own Android OS is out running on handsets in all corners of the globe.
Google clearly hope that their newly released Android platform will rise to be the dominant mobile platform, but until it gains market traction they've figured they better invest something in the iPhone platform too.
Still, it's hard to argue that Google's commitment to iPhone has been truly inspired. Sure, Earth is a great app for the iPhone, but where's a Google Reader app, or a Google Docs app?
Google Earth is a free download from the iTunes App Store.