Google Earth iPhone App

Jay takes a look at the iPhone version of the Google Earth application.

Hi I’m Jay Goldman, and you’re watching Mr.Mobile. Today we’re going to take a look at an iPhone application from Google, and they got a bunch of iPhone applications, but today we’re going to take a look at Google Earth. You might have played with Google Earth on your computer and in fact it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux from Earth.Google.com so you can definitely play the desktop version but there is a really neat feature in the iPhone that I think you will going to like. Just giving you a little warning in advance, though, you’re going to need a little bit of patience, sometimes Google Earth takes a long time to load from your home screen so I’m going to tap on the icon here and then we are going to get this picture of the Earth, and then we’ll wait for it to load. Once Google Earth does come up, it automatically uses your GPS coordinates to find you on a map so we get a sort of trademark Google Earth flying to where we are. But, we can also search for other locations if we want to see something different. So I can tap on the magnifying glass icon here, and then I can type in any location I’d like to see. And for the next trick I want to show you, it’s really important to find a location that actually has 3D buildings, I recommend New York but mostly major cities in the US are covered. So I’m going to tap on that magnifying glass and then standard iPhone search box I’m just going to tap, type in the location that I want to see, in this case I’m just going to put New York, and will let the phone sort of center itself around that. And once I tap on a location, the phone automatically goes and finds it for me. So, here we are, in New York City. And the neat trick that I mentioned before is that Google Earth actually uses the accelerometer on your phone to give you what they call Auto tilt note, so by just tilting the phone, I can actually change my perspective and see the horizon; I can tilt the phone back down, and be right back down until the downtown here. You will also see the little blue icons and the little white W icons which are Wikipedia articles I can actually tap on anyone of those and that will bring up whatever content it is that somebody has linked to that site. So, it might be a photo from Flicker that’s got you a tagging information on it, or might be a Wikipedia article that somebody is has posted about a site, which is a great way to explore the world and learn a little bit more about it. I’m Jay Goldman, this has been Mr. Mobile. You can grab Google Earth from the iTunes App Store, it is actually free application, you can also get it on your desktop from Earth.Google.com. Thanks for watching, check us out on butterscotch.com for more episodes, for more of the great butterscotch shows you have come to know and love. See you next time.