Hold the Planet in Your Palm With Google Earth for the iPhone
Google Earth is now available on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Although Earthscape previously released a version of Google Earth for Apple’s mobile devices, the official app is considerably faster and free (though EarthScape has since dropped its price to free as well).
In fact, the iPhone version of Google Earth is remarkably speedy considering its complexity and the fact that it’s constantly streaming data from the web. Using a wifi connection there was almost no hesitation in my testing. Falling back to an Edge connection did of course slow things down.
Our sister site, Gadget Lab, found similar results, concluding that Google Earth on the iPhone “speeds along at a fair clip.”
As you would expect, the iPhone version takes advantage of all the touch screen niceties — pinch to zoom, twist to spin the map and throw the screen to move around. Tilting the iPhone screen adjusts the altitude of your view.
Navigating Google Earth with your fingers takes some getting used to — changing the angle of your view using the tilt features is by far the tickiest part — but once you adjust it’s easy to get where you want to go. Like the Google Maps app on the iPhone, Google Earth can zoom in on your current location by using the iPhone’s GPS triangulation tools.
The main downside to the iPhone version of Google Earth is that you can’t add custom layers or download any of the cool Google Earth overlays. Currently the app offers overlay markers for Wikipedia entries and Panoramio photos, but that’s the extend of third-party content.
Google Earth for the iPhone is free and can be downloaded through Apple’s App store (iTunes link).
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