Slashgeo

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.

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.

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.

Last week, All Points Blog linked to an article on Nokia developing a navigating system based on image recognition. From the article: "With landmark-based navigation you won’t even need to know your address or cross streets to get directions. You just take a picture of a nearby landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, with the camera in your mobile phone. Then, Nokia will match your photo with other landmark photos in its mapping database, and tell you where you are. Instructions to your destination are given by red arrows added to pictures, text or voice." Related stories below include GPS phones used to identify landmarks and the Open Landmark directory.

The What Is Special About Geospatial blog informs us about this. From their summary : "Today Google has integrated Streetview in Google Maps routing. If you generate a routing inside a city with Streetview you can see a camera. With a click on this camera a Streetview window is comming up where the street scene of the position is shown."

For more information and a link to see it in action, visit the blog link above. Remember, click on the camera next to the turn by turn direction to see the streetview representation of it. Update: 04/29 21:09 GMT by S :Here's the official Google Lat Long announcement.