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Google Local client for mobile phones

Google has launched Google Local for mobile, a Java application front-end to Google Maps.

mobile mapsat

I installed the application to my Nokia 7610 today to try it out. Overall, the interactivity is nice. Map movements are fluid, and navigating the application is pretty straight forward. However, there certainly are some compromises. To start, the application pops up a networking confirmation dialog for every network request. That means you spend a lot of time repeatedly clicking 'Yes' while trying to scroll or zoom your maps:

connection

It's also not exactly fast, so you see this a lot as well:

loading

However, even with these two issues, the features are still fairly compelling for a mobile application. For starters, you do actually have the ability to do a local search to pull up maps and addresses:

menu

search

You can also call a business directly from the search result:

local result

I certainly would have preferred to see a native S60 application that uses local caching to speed up map drawing, but I guess a J2ME client is better then nothing... and I imagine that I'll be using this application a lot while traveling, so Thanks Google!