Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minuman from pocketnow.com Google Maps 5 has been released for android and in this video we're going to take a look at how it works here on the Nexus S let's get to it now of course Google Maps 5 will be released for the other platforms in due time it's starting out on Android we're testing on the Google Nexus as to get the best experience possible because there's a lot of sort of high-performance requiring tactics that this new version of google maps employees for example it does vector based rendering so that it's faster it also pre caches map data so that it seems like the data of the maps of pre-loaded onto your device so there's less checkerboards which can be quite annoying so let's go into here and we're going to zoom out and we're going to turn off the layer view here we don't want to see the satellite view and let's say we're in downtown San Francisco and we're looking around and presumably looking for a nearby coffee shop or something watch what happens now as you get close in on the streets you're going to see buildings pop up boom they're there they kind of fade into view and now with kind of a convergence like feature between Google Earth and Google Maps we can do this really awesome 3d pen and the performance is awesome then we can rotate our fingers with multi-touch here and kind of look at the city of San Francisco in a 3d way and I can I can do pretty much three gestures in one with two fingers on the screen I can tilt up and down I can pivot around like this or I can pinch to zoom so a lot of multi-touch capabilities here and by the way a setting that you want to change right out of the box especially if you have an unlimited data plan go down here into settings cash settings and turn on prefetch on mobile what this will do is prefetch map data so you're not seeing the checkerboards again if you're not on an unlimited data plan you don't want to use this because it's going to use a lot of data but hey if you got the unlimited data you might as well so really cool vector based navigation it is superfluid super smooth and you get this 3d view the buildings are sort of popping up as I'm moving along of course the 3d effect is only present in in cities and if we tilt back and we zoom out we're just back to the standard map view and it's just very little checkerboards here because it's pre loading the data sort of anticipating that I'm going to be wanting to move around on the screen so really cool if you've got an android phone you should definitely hit up the upgrade it's free and it works pretty darn well versions for other platforms are forthcoming if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and thanks for watching that's it for now