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Google's Android: 3D globe but no Google Earth

posted by lxnyce on Monday November 12, @04:30PM        Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the paranoid-androids-don't-walk-on-virtual-globes dept.

Ogle Earth has video along with a report about this new development. Here is their summary : "Four minutes into this demo of Google's Android mobile platform, you get to see a 3D globe that you can spin by dragging your finger across the touch screen"..."But it's not Google Earth; it's an application that the presenter, Steve Horowitz, calls "global time", presumably because it can show you what time of day it is on different parts of the planet. I bet this is what the New York Times supposed was Google Earth, and it is certainly what Robert Scoble erroneously refers to as "a Google earth map" in his post about that video. (Still, if he hadn't called it that, my RSS reader's filters wouldn't have picked it up, so I can't complain too loudly:-)". Head on over to Ogle Earth to see the video and get an in depth analysis.

Over on SlashDot, there is currently a conversation going on about the announcement of the Android SDK which was released today, which is somewhat related. Head on over there for the full detail.

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Google Earth to run on Google's mobile platform! [+]

Ogle Earth reports about Google's plans for Google Earth on their mobile platform just specs just released today. Here is Ogle Earth's summary :

"When the Apple iPhone came out, we were told it ran on a variant of OS X. It was only natural to speculate whether it might not run Google Earth. Now Google has released the specs for Android, its mobile platform, and we are told it will run on a variant of Linux. Google Earth also runs on Linux, so do we need to start speculating whether Google Earth will run on Google-platform mobiles?

No need! The guy behind the platform, Andy Rubin, has just shown the New York Times a version of Google Earth running on a mobile device: "

Head on over to Ogle Earth for the full details.

Application Domains: Google's Android and its Location Awareness [+]

The Google Android mobile phone platform was featured in a few geoblogs entry since its announcement (including on Slashgeo). In an November post, Google's Ed Parsons describes the location management in Android: "With Android the Location Manager component is part of the core application framework, meaning that all user applications have access to the devices location. At a simple level this means that applications like the address book as access to the device location, so your contacts rather than sorted alphabetically could be sorted based on distance from your locations." More recently, All Points Blog informed us there is already a spatial database for Android, and even a location-based "paintball" game named WiFi Army. Development for the platform is fostered by challenges with significant prizes and several companies are jumping on the Android location bandwagon. Android is not fully open source, from the Wikipedia page: "Android has been criticized by some because it is not really open-sourced despite what was announced by Google (some parts of the SDK are still proprietary software), and some believe it is a conscious decision to control the platform by Google." On a more or less unrelated note, Nokia, with the acquisition of Qt, may sooner than later include Google Earth on its smartphones.

• Google's Ed Parsons on Android

  (Score:2)

  by Satri (3) on Wednesday November 14, @10:34AM (#1942)
  ( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )

  Here [edparsons.com]: "With Android the Location Manager component is part of the core application framework, meaning that all user applications have access to the devices location. At a simple level this means that applications like the address book as access to the device location, so your contacts rather than sorted alphabetically could be sorted based on distance from your locations."