Gadgetory

hey this is dieter Bowen for The Verge and Google Maps for the iPhone is finally here and I got to say it's pretty amazing now what you're looking at here is actually the b-roll footage that Google has provided to media outlets we haven't had a chance to shoot a video of the app ourselves yet although I did get a chance to take a look at the app when I was at Google's offices the other day so what you need to know about Google Maps for the iPhone is it is really fast and it is completely native Google is using vectors to draw the map which means that it doesn't take up a ton of data and it just pans around really fast on the iPhone 5 that we saw it on it was even better performing than I've seen Google Maps performance and Nexus 4 or galaxy s3 the other thing about Google Maps is that it's really well designed it takes a lot of the design cues from the recent Gmail for iPhone update which means there's nice clean white info sheets you can swipe around between different parts of the app and you know it just looks great it's the best-looking Maps app I've seen on any mobile phone of course most of the standard Google Maps features are here you have turned by turn directions you have standard navigation you have full transit information you have satellite view you have Street View you have indoor view about the only thing that isn't here is indoor maps and there's also no support for offline which is kind of a bummer hopefully that'll come in a future update although there is some caching that happens but it's not fully dependable if you're not going to be on the Internet so Google Maps fully supports turn-by-turn navigation and it will actually work when you're not in the app what it does is it takes a standard iOS pop-up notification and gives that to you and your turn is coming up so if you're on the lockscreen or if you're in some other app a notification will pop up when your next turn is approaching and that notification will actually be spoken if you turn that on which is a pretty clever feature one other thing about Google Maps that's interesting is that Google is providing a couple of tools to developers to integrate Google Maps if a developer chooses they can choose to link to Google Maps instead of to Apple maps from within their app to give directions and whatnot and developers will also be able to build Google Maps directly into their own apps using an SDK that Google is releasing so that's just a quick overview of what there is on Google Maps on top of Google's footage of Google Maps we'll have our own hands on and impressions of the full app very soon stay tuned