Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and google just released a new version of google maps version 4.4 what's in it what's been updated let's go look ok Google Maps is the only app that I know of that has several icons to get into various different things that it does you take a look we've got maps which is just that that's your Maps it's got latitude that's your social location sharing part of Google Maps it's got navigation which you're all familiar with by now and it's got this new icon called places also got shortcuts and I'll show you a little bit about those in just a minute let's jump into maps and see what's new force and foremost let's go into the about screen and you'll notice here this is version 4.4 but you'll also notice that this is all on white it's black text on a white background this is really a change for Google because they've been doing a lot of their stuff with white text on a back a black background the reason for that they said is to save battery life and the screens on these devices chew up more battery than anything else even Wi-Fi and the cell phone radios screens take up a lot of power so they're trying to do what they can to conserve battery life then again with the new color scheme it looks like they're going over to what people like which is the light themes so let's take a look I've turned on some labs here so let me turn those off you can see I've got a whole bunch of stuff already turned on in my layers let me show you how to do this so we go back into more and you can see labs these labs are the same things that we're familiar with you've got a scale bar that you can add on to your screen just so you can get a rough idea of what the scale of that map is you know how close zoomed in you are it's got this layers button which is quick access to be able to turn on and off look various layers it's got traffic with labels this one's still a little bit buggy but what it does is it lets you see the label of the street through the traffic indicator so here you can see this is a green street meaning traffic slowing really well but you can still see that this is the San Diego freeway so that's something that I really like they've got to work a little bit on the opacity to make sure that the traffic data is still visible while making the street name visible to the my location button just in case you're scrolling all around the map to see what's around you if you want to go back to where you are really quickly tap that and it'll take you there i'll go ahead and turn that on because i kind of like that feature bubble buttons is a little bit weirdly named in my opinion what this does is it changes the way that you click on things then the bubble that pops up so it's a little bit more interactive it adds buttons that you can call and get directions directly to a search result right there in that that pop up bubble very nice very convenient I like it better than without the lab turned on last but not least is measure if you want to find out how far it is between two points you can turn on measure I've never had a need for that if I ever do I'll come in and turn it on manually but let's go back you can see here on the map this is where i am and i'm looking at it in let's see what my layers mode is traffic and terrain mode so i kind of like satellite so let's switch over to that and now you can see satellite all stuff that you're very familiar with you can see my icon up here this is being fed from latitude which brings me to latitude these are people that I'm friends with that are not necessarily around me daniel webster and george anderson for example nowhere near me but I've got them on there and if they're ever around I'll be able to see where they are it's really nice to see where your friends are where they're going so if somebody's in your body you can grab a quick lunch you can get ahold of them for example if we want to come in here you can tap and hold on someone my wife for example and it brings up all of their contact information so i can call go right to their contact text gmail or even google talk with my wife right there very convenient and then of course when they're on the map you'll be able to see them near you I'll see if I've got any of my friends nearby and I do I've got a couple people over here just off the freeway so I could be able to call them up and say hey let's go out for breakfast kind of neat kind of cool you can see right in it in here let me scroll in a little bit this is what I was talking about that that transparency on the traffic data I can see that this is Veterans Memorial Highway but because the traffic data is kind of opaque you can see through it they still have to work on a little bit it's a lab hey not a big deal but let's go back over here navigation you're familiar with navigation of course again you've got the black text on a white background so that's different you've got a quick icon over here to take you back to maps you've got a Settings icon looks like gears and this lets you customize your route I don't like holes so we're going to avoid them speak your destination type it get it from your contact starred items this is a biggie if you have some place that you like to go just tap on start items and if you start it before it's in there this is favorites taken across every single thing on the phone and its really really convenient down at the bottom of the screen you've got recent destinations places that you have searched for recently Maria very easy come back over here i already showed you a latitude that's just a quick shortcut into it and i want to save this place is just for a minute to show you something that you probably don't know about and that's these shortcuts if i want to go to save the White House I can make a shortcut to take me to the White House and this icon I can customize it if you look down at the bottom it's got a little bus on the arrow I don't know if you can see that see if we get up real close here and see it so there's a little bus down there that means that not only have I put in the address for this location but I've also told it that I want to go there using mass transit now that's not going to help because there's no mass transit data in my location as you can see here transit routing is not available but it brings me right up here and says do you want to change this to navigate by car by bicycle or by walking well let's go ahead and change it to car choose go now if I'm in a more metropolitan area specifically the east coast or west coast where that mass transit data is readily available I can still use that shortcut and it will show me how to get to that location using mass transit so it's not a bad thing to have on there that's just your preferred method to get there you can see here again going to the white background we can now show this location on the map navigate and the directions to get there are down at the bottom and see here that these are toll roads that I have to take so let's go ahead and navigate there it's going to fire up the navigation part of google maps again this is all inside the maps app and it's going to get driving directions this time it takes a little while because I'm navigating to the White House and I am a good 2,000 miles away come over here and look at the route info and see exactly where I need to go if I don't like this row and I want to go another way just tap on the routing icon and I can choose from a couple of other routes that may this one for examples about 25 miles longer but it takes the same amount of time so i can tap on that and go I 82 I 70 or if I want to take a little bit longer time on i-64 I can do that as well something I didn't know is looking at where I am and washington DC were about the same latitude they're kind of fun so now what everybody's been waiting for let me just get all the way back is this new places this is something that's been missing from google maps for a long time and it's something that layer and other augmented reality and other mapping softwares have been a little bit more up to date on if you tap on places it will show you a categorical list of things near you so if i want to find the nearest gas station I tap on that it does a quick search for gas stations and it shows me right here distance is whether i started or not maybe even a picture and customer reviews of that location so that's really really nice is very helpful if i want to go down here to 7-eleven I believe this is even my favorite 7-eleven where I get most of my caffeine so good plug there yeah that's Colleen I see her almost every day I can now see that on a map I can get directions to it I can call them right from here and I don't remember what that last one is oh that's street view I can see what this looks like as I'm driving down the street so I know what to look for so very nice very intuitive this is a huge update for google maps something i really really like about google and their maps product is the updates that come out to it but this is the first time that it's been more than just a bug release or a very minor feature iteration this is every bit as big as when they added navigation to to their map software I really like it one thing I'd like them to do so if anybody at Google is listening I want to be able to customize these yes i can add a custom search so if i want to look for say parking lot the parking lot that's spelled with an O these days and not a you guys try typing on camera it's not as easy as you might think so if I want to look for parking lot I can add that and now down at the bottom I've got parking lots and it will do a search for parking lot it's just a really quick shortcut to things that you search for frequently what I don't like is I can't customize these icons and I can't get rid of it I don't drink so I really don't have any use for bars but I would really love to be able to have something else on here that would replace it so if I could be able to tap and hold and remove and replace it with something else I think that would be a great thing so Google there's my tip now the last thing is I promised I'd show you how to add one of these shortcuts tap and hold and go down here to shortcuts and you can choose directions in navigate shin and put in either an address or a person's name and get directions to it here's the method of travel by car by mass transit etc and the fact that you want turn-by-turn navigation by default you can give it a name and then you've got all these icons to choose from go ahead and save that and now you've got a new icon right there which I've done for home I've got a shortcut on my home screen that I can tap that will take me back to my house so if I've ended up somewhere where I am or I don't know the fastest way to get back home one touch navigate and it shows me the quickest way to get home good work Google keep polishing I know that you guys had a lot more in store for us and I think that's great you guys out there if you like Google Maps and the frequency of their map updates give this video a thumbs up you'd like to stay in touch with everything that's going on the mobile world the updates to Google Apps go ahead and subscribe to our video channel if you have any questions or comments leave those in the comments below and of course if you haven't been out to pocketnow.com the website recently go ahead and head on over there we've got lots of stuff that's not in videos for you to see so showing off some of the new features of google maps 4.4 for android i'm joe for pocketnow.com