Google Earth Hits iPhone (and iPod touch)! [Video]

Posted on October 27th, 2008. Written by Arron.

Hold the world in the palm of your hands. If built-in Google Maps wasn’t enough for you, last night to everyone’s surprise, Google started pushing a native version of their location software Google Earth out onto the App Store. Even better? – It’s Free.

Flying from the UK to Australia takes just a swipe of the finger.
Hit the jump for a full look …

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• Show the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the Location feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places, and business around the globe with Google Local Search

“The free software started becoming available through Apple’s App store on Sunday (October 26). It’s a free download in 20 countries, running in all 18 languages the iPhone supports.”

When you first open Google Earth, you’ll be greeted with a visual representation of the globe. Simply swipe to pan around it. There are four interface buttons within the application. The one in the top left is something that Google does best. Search. Places, points of interest, post and zip codes – enter whatever want, and find it instantly.

The top right button features as your compass. Tap at any point within your viewing to spin what is actually North, to the top of your screen. The button on the bottom left takes advantage of the built in GPS module of the iPhone. It’s a ‘Current Location’ button. Tap it, and dependent on whether you have ‘Location Services’ turned on in iPhone OS Settings, Google Earth will zoom all the way (and I add, with precision accuracy) to your current location on the globe. The bottom right button when tapped flips over the whole interface over to reveal a slurry of user customisable settings.

Wikipedia Integration
Google has turned to one of (if not the) largest encyclopedia’s on the net to provide all that vital information of each city or place of interest. Yep, none other than Wikipedia (wikipedia.org). Scattered across the globe, you’ll find little Wiki icons. Tap them, and Google will load the Wikipedia page for that item, in all it’s gory, in it’s own built-in browser.

Caching
What’s even more cool, is Google Earth for iPhone saves where you’ve previously been in it’s application resources folder. This means, you can access everywhere you’ve visited on the virtual globe, offline, without having to re-load the data!

Tilt Browsing ..
They didn’t stop there though. Not only did they port the whole globe and it attributes to the touch platform, they also ported tilt views. Wherever your viewing, simply tilt your device back and forth, and you’ll notice your now panning the globe at an angle. As well as using the accelerometer (this setting can be toggled in settings), Google have implemented a few multi-touch gestures into the interface, one of which include using two fingers together, and swiping down or up to tilt the globe. While tilted, you can even search and fly to places!

Animation
In order to get to places your interested in, there is a huge need for animation by Google Earth. If you’ve ever used Google Earth on a Mac or PC, it animates the maps in exactly the same fashion. Zooming and panning were pretty smooth (most of the time), although doing too much at once caused the application to either crash back to the home screen or freeze on several occasions.

Crashilicious
There’s one thing you can say about Google Earth on iPhone, and that’s “you can tell it’s at version 1.0″. I was on the application for roughly 20 minutes, and within that time it had crashed back to the home screen at least 8 times.

It already has 8 reviews, with a 4 and a 1/2 star rating. I think once Google push updates through to this, it can only get better. One feature I’d like to see implemented pretty quickly is the 3D landscapes, where you can toggle 3D buildings and structure rendering on/off.

Grab your Copy: Google Earth