Gadgetory

hey guys jon rettinger here there's a lot of great things to like about the droid by motorola but one thing in particular stands out it's got turn-by-turn directions by Google granted it's in beta but it is a free offering it's going to be included with any Android to point out of ice most smartphones have had some sort of Google Maps it's been on the iphone it's been on previous Android devices BlackBerry's got it Simeon's got it really every operating system has it but it's the first time we've seen turn-by-turn directions on an Android device it's actually done by Google at the great price of free so it's still available and give you a quick demonstration of what it looks like and how it works so right there it says car home and it's a separate application then the maps that you're probably used to so go ahead and open that up and you get won't wait very slick looking doc taking advantage of the voice search you can either do voice search go right to navigation you can view your map contact if you have somebody to address stored in your context books search or take you back home and the search is pretty neat because it will actually do a google search and a little hot length all the addresses and you click one and you head right off so I'll show you what this looks like and I'll show you using the voice search because it works quite well so you can say street address or you can say the name of a landmark or place it's certainly gps aware so it knows where you are so it'll search for things in your vicinity so there's a big mole by me called South Coast Plaza so I'm going to search for that via voice search and see how this works and keep in mind that all of this still is completely beta south coast plaza see if that worked so it found it south coast plaza there's a map of where it is and I can go ahead and route myself right there it says get directions go ahead hit get directions I can either use the browser or the map certainly I want to use maps and let's see what happens ok so there we go and brought to a navigation screen I can either drive there I'm taking a bus or walk so it's using my location to south coast plaza we'll go ahead and hit go it's calculating driving directions it gives you an overview of where you need to go and I go it'll show it on a map if you like and I'll go ahead and hit navigate one more time now I see in the splash screen for Google Maps Navigation it's looking for my gps signal so you can hear it's a very mechanized voice but it really works quite well and it's got some cool features on it that might not find that some of your baseline GPS units and as you saw i rotate it so we'll definitely take advantage of accelerometer depending on where you are if you've got a car kit or something for example put this write-up on your dash so you've got a few options that you can do first you go I'd hit the menu button you can get your all your route info you can start adding some layers to this map so let's go ahead and add a layer I can add traffic view if I'm say I'm driving to Los Angeles and Simon Orange County and I want to see if there's traffic it'll overlay it with traffic let's say that's not good enough I want satellite view well we're going to put a satellite view right on top of that and if that's still not enough for you you go ahead and get parking in a show you where all the parking spots are the big parking lots along the way and there's a really great different off today you could have you can exit the navigation you can mute it you can get the route info which will give you the turn-by-turn with where you want to go so you know it'll tell you a left turn ahead but you want to know what's after that left turn you can find out right there you can have some more information you get your full directions less to your destinations or of course the terms if you hit the arrow it will give you a a almost a street view look from where you are and where you're going and it'll rotate around with you and you can certainly pan around to where you'd like now one of the downsides of this is that it is of course network based so you're not storing any map directly on the device so this won't function if you don't have a clear view of the sky and a verizon data signal it's not like some of the conference for for tomtom that we've seen on mobile devices or it actually puts a whole slew of maps on your device this you need to have a data connection for i will say that it's a little bit buggy i had to crash a few times but that's to be expected at the beta application it works well and best part is it's free so for those of you that are going to go hop out and pick up the motorola droid this is going to be very welcome addition for those of you that are waiting for your android device calf grid 2 point 0 this is something that you can look forward to hope you enjoyed this overview of the google maps navigation i'm jon rettinger for exclusive content check me on twitter twitter.com / drown for lakers and to learn more about how we did this test and all your tech news check out technobuffalo comm links will be in the sidebar I'll see you guys the next video bye bye