Google Maps Navigation
• Google Navigator for Android Review: Good For Free But Far From Perfect
• Google Maps Navigation: A Free, Ass-Kicking, Turn-by-Turn Mobile App

(An)Droid:
• Motorola Droid First Hands On: It’s a Terminator
• A Visual Guide to Android 2.0: So Much Nicer
• No Android Version of HTC HD2 After All?
• GSM Motorola Droid Caught on Video
• How Motorola Stopped Sucking
• Droid Eris Doesn’t Look Too Shabby for a Cheapo Android Phone
• HTC Droid Eris Might Be the Cheapest Android Phone at $US99
• HTC Hero Among First To Get Android 2.0 Update

Reviews:
• $1000 1080p Projector Battlemodo: Optoma HD20 vs Vivitek H1080FD
• BlackBerry Storm 2 Review: Improving, But Still Mostly Cloudy
• Corsair Flash Voyager 128GB USB Drive: As Big and Fast As a Small Fish
• Canon S90 Review: It’ll Never Leave My Pocket (Except When I’m Taking Pictures)
• Samsung Moment Review: The ED-209 of Android Phones

The Copy/Paste Twins Saga
• I Want to Have Twins Just to Get Them These Awesome T-Shirts
• Twin Apple Fangirls Pwn Twin PC Clones

The Rest:
• 12 Things You Need To Know About Apple TV 3.0
• High Res Video of Ares I-X Launch
• http://gizmodo.com/5393755/an-astronaut-explains-how-well-fall-in-love-with-space-again
• Apple Tablet Will Restore Comic Books To Former Glory
• Build The Spirit Radio That Creeped Out Tesla Himself
• Behold, the BlackBerry* Watch: $US150, Coming in February

The Game Changer

Brian already went through the details when he broke the news, all the features you need to know about. On paper, this baby sounds like it has everything the $US100 apps have, and it’s free (for Android 2.0 users). I won’t go over all of the features again—live traffic, over-the-air maps, multiple visual layers, search along routes, etc.—so I encourage you to read that. This is what it feels to use the thing day to day, the wheels-on-the-ground perspective, and though it’s certainly as powerful as billed, the experience itself is a little more sobering.

On Android 2.0, on the Verizon Wireless Motorola Droid I’ve been testing, Google navigation is part of the Car Home suite, an easy-to-read, easy-to-reach set of apps including map, turn-by-turn navigation, voice search, text search and contacts. However, as you can probably guess from reading that lineup, the lines are so blurry it can get confusing fast. The sane place to start is voice search.

Voices In, Voices Out

The surprise hit of Google’s new software is the voice command. I said “Navigate to Cloud City” and it quickly launched the navigator, showing me a few options with “Cloud City” in the name. On top was my wife’s favourite coffee shop (home of my favourite BBQ pulled-pork sandwich). I tapped it and got on my way. I have done this with street addresses, store names and categories like simply “barbecue” and it’s worked fine. It’s only when I tried text searching that things got iffy.

But voice command isn’t the only voice feature that’s awesome on this. The turn-by-turn lady may be a tad robotronic, but that’s because she tells you everything, including street names and numbers. Text-to-speech is considered a bit of a premium among the iPhone apps (many have it or are getting it, but not all do), so to find it for free is impressive.

Searching Highs, Searching Lows

As I mentioned, the text search is not as smooth as the voice-activated stuff. That’s because there are several different places to search, and at times they overlap in ways that make my head feel light. There’s the basic directions view that iPhone users are used to seeing, where you type a destination with no predictive guessing on the app’s part. Once you finish typing, it picks the most likely destination or offers you some options. Then there’s the true “Search” window that gives you a keyboard and lets you type whatever you like, and tries to anticipate what it is you’re typing by showing you similar past searches. And then there’s a screen of all your past searches, that you can only get to by backing out of the main Search window. It’s strange, and took me a while to figure out how to return to this little Narnia of a helpful screen.

If that’s not chaotic enough, well, take away any browsable POI menus, any “go home” preset address feature, and any multi-stop trip planning tool. Scared yet? At least its only a few taps to your contacts—which you can fill up with all your favourite destinations—but only if you remember what those taps are.

Street View Blues

One of the things I was super excited about when Brian came back from his secret Google meeting was the Street View feature: When you came to a tricky intersection, Google would show you the actual intersection, and you would know just where to turn. Well, I live in Seattle, one of the biggest cities and certainly one of the most high-tech, and though I’ve driven with this thing on a few outings this week, I haven’t once been shown a photo of an intersection. (Note: Brian says you have to tap the screen to see the picture as you approach an intersection, to which I reply, “Sounds suicidal, I’ll pass.”)

I do, however, see the photos pop up when I reach my destination, and without exception they’ve looked awful. Sure, you can flick them around once you’ve stopped, but I think this highlights the major trouble with Street View on a mobile platform.

Steady As She Goes

The driving directions are, for the most part, just fine. Re-routing is fast when you make an unscheduled turn, and the Droid phone appears to track the road as well or better than an iPhone. I have heard others talk of reliability issues, but frankly, that kind of evaluation takes weeks or months, and results can differ from location to location. Nobody outside of Google knows exactly what the reliability weak points are, especially since Google is using (from what I can tell) its own map data.

When you’ve navigated, you can pull up layers—traffic view, which shows you where the trouble’s going to be; satellite view, which looks neat but I don’t know how practical it is; and POI layers, like where the nearest gas or parking is. There’s some customisation you can do to this, but only in the 2D bird’s-eye view.

The power comes when you select the Route Info screen (shown above), by popping up a menu while in your navigation screen. There you can see an icon with a solid arrow and a broken arrow, indicating alternate routes. Tap that icon, and you’ll see your route plus two ghostly alternatives. By selecting one of the alternatives up top, you can re-route. The Route Info screen also contains the all-important turn-by-turn list, buried a bit more than I’d like, but clear and readable nonetheless.

Tooling around northeast Seattle has been fine. My gripes about the driving interface are mostly cosmetic: You can see the time till arrival, in hours and minutes, but you don’t see a time of arrival, which I prefer. On other navigators and apps I’ve gotten used to seeing my speed in MPH and even posted speed limits, and Google doesn’t show those either.

But at least the screen is clean and easy to read. If the screen stayed like this, I’d live.

Someday We’ll Meet Again?

I spent a lot of time telling you what’s wrong with the Google navigation app, but that’s mostly because I get the feeling we’ll all be experiencing it one way or another soon enough, be it on this exceptional Motorola Droid, other Android handsets or even on the iPhone. It’s an extremely powerful program, but the execution isn’t the best. Not by a stretch.

Still, if this was built in to the iPhone’s Google Maps, or offered as a free download at the App Store, damn would it steal customers like a mofo. You might still see the occasional sale of a Navigon or a CoPilot, because of particular necessary features and because of the onboard map databases (which people who go off-grid prefer), but really, this thing would—and probably will—swallow the GPS app market alive.

Because of that, I am hoping Google’s developers pay close attention to this review, too. The app is still in beta, but there’s a lot of user-interface work yet to be done. Google: If you’re going to knock everyone else off the mountain, at least give us an app worthy of a king.

Amazing voice recognition engine

Live traffic and alternate route planner

Text-to-speech

Good routing and fast re-routing

Satellite view and other views not always useful

Text search features are overlapping, confusing

Interface overall needs better flow

No POI category browsing or “go home” feature

No multi-stop trip planner

In other words, AIDA is like your highway helper. A robot pal you can bond with on those long lonely trips. Kind of like a naggy, whiny version of Kitt.

To identify the set of goals the driver would like to achieve, AIDA analyses the driver’s mobility patterns, keeping track of common routes and destinations. AIDA draws on an understanding of the city beyond what can be seen through the windshield, incorporating real-time event information and knowledge of environmental conditions, as well as commercial activity, tourist attractions, and residential areas.

“When it merges knowledge about the city with an understanding of the driver’s priorities and needs, AIDA can make important inferences,” explains Assaf Biderman, associate director of the SENSEable City Lab. “Within a week AIDA will have figured out your home and work location. Soon afterwards the system will be able to direct you to your preferred grocery store, suggesting a route that avoids a street fair-induced traffic jam. On the way AIDA might recommend a stop to fill up your tank, upon noticing that you are getting low on gas,” says Biderman. “AIDA can also give you feedback on your driving, helping you achieve more energy efficiency and safer behaviour.”

Oh, and did I mention that it emotes with facial expressions? I have plenty of relatives that are perfectly willing to bitch about my driving as it is. On the other hand, maybe AIDA will qualify as an additional passenger on transit lanes — then maybe it can tag along.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT researchers and designers are developing the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) – a new in-car personal robot that aims to change the way we interact with our car. The project is a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.

“With the ubiquity of sensors and mobile computers, information about our surroundings is ever abundant. AIDA embodies a new effort to make sense of these great amounts of data, harnessing our personal electronic devices as tools for behavioral support,” comments professor Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSEable City Lab. “In developing AIDA we asked ourselves how we could design a system that would offer the same kind of guidance as an informed and friendly companion.”

AIDA communicates with the driver through a small robot embedded in the dashboard. “AIDA builds on our long experience in building sociable robots,” explains professor Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. “We are developing AIDA to read the driver’s mood from facial expression and other cues and respond in a socially appropriate and informative way.”

AIDA communicates in a very immediate way: with the seamlessness of a smile or the blink of an eye. Over time, the project envisions that a kind of symbiotic relationship develops between the driver and AIDA, whereby both parties learn from each other and establish an affective bond.

To identify the set of goals the driver would like to achieve, AIDA analyses the driver’s mobility patterns, keeping track of common routes and destinations. AIDA draws on an understanding of the city beyond what can be seen through the windshield, incorporating real-time event information and knowledge of environmental conditions, as well as commercial activity, tourist attractions, and residential areas.

“When it merges knowledge about the city with an understanding of the driver’s priorities and needs, AIDA can make important inferences,” explains Assaf Biderman, associate director of the SENSEable City Lab. “Within a week AIDA will have figured out your home and work location. Soon afterwards the system will be able to direct you to your preferred grocery store, suggesting a route that avoids a street fair-induced traffic jam. On the way AIDA might recommend a stop to fill up your tank, upon noticing that you are getting low on gas,” says Biderman. “AIDA can also give you feedback on your driving, helping you achieve more energy efficiency and safer behaviour.”

AIDA was developed in partnership with Audi, a premium brand of the Volkswagen Group, and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab. The AIDA team is directed by Professor Cynthia Breazeal, Carlo Ratti, and Assaf Biderman. The SENSEable City Lab team includes team leader Giusy di Lorenzo and includes Francisco Pereira, Fabio Pinelli, Pedro Correia, E Roon Kang, Jennifer Dunnam, and Shaocong Zhou. The Personal Robots Group’s technical and aesthetic team includes Mikey Siegel, Fardad Faridi and Ryan Wistort as well as videographers Paula Aguilera and Jonathan Williams. Chuhee Lee and Charles Lee represent the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.

[MIT]

Fortunately, that is plenty of time for subscribers to the GPS information service to jump ship. You don’t even have to wait for your subscription to terminate — just shut down your service anytime before the end date and receive a refund for the unused portion of your service. Check out the MSN Direct page for the full details. [MSN Direct via Electronista]

AU: Google Maps Navigation is currently only available in the US. _-EH

• What’s getting it: It’s Android OS 2.0 only for now, and will be available when devices like that ship. (Google demo’d the app to us on a Droid, FWIW.) Other platform support will be announced “by carriers and phone makers” when they’re ready, but Google implied they are working closely with Apple now on it.

• How you tell it where to go: Addresses are input by both text and voice (using the same tech as in the iPhone’s Google mobile app). But the app can take things like business names and restaurant types as well as soft queries like “that museum that has the king tut exhibit” and return a list of suggested locations.

• Traffic handling: The traffic data, as on Google Maps, is driven by multiple sources. Typically, this means data from local road authority services, like speed cameras, but also data from mobile phones using Google Maps.

• Price: It’s free, and there are no ads. There’s nothing like it in the App store that’s less than $US50 a year.

• Turn-by-turn voice: Maps cache along your intended route, so even if your connection dies along the way the route will still show you what you need to see, and voice synthesis of street names still works too.

• Maps that never age: Like most cloud map services, you’ll never need to update your map data, but you have to download route maps every time you head out (so you need mobile reception at the starting point).

• Unique views: It has satellite view, which is super cool for context on the street, but also, it has streetview. Streetview images come up, overlayed with arrows, when you’re supposed to turn. Or at your final destination. Since streetview images have metadata on direction faced and position, Google Maps Navigation intelligently draws the arrows where you’re supposed to go. Sort of.

• Traffic UI: Traffic icon is simple — green, yellow and red according to flow of traffic, with time to arrival numbers next to the symbol. If you click on the traffic icon, the map zooms out to show congestion points along your route.

• Multi-destination routing? There’s no multiple route selection to help you plan a day’s drive of many locations. But you can search for locations (petrol, eateries) along your route, and those results will show up on the map as long as they’re within a radius that moves long your path. You can also pre-determine your stops and quickly queue up the next when you reach each destination.

• Navigate to point on map: You can tell it to navigate to a location by spotting it on a map and holding your finger down on that point.

• OS integration: You can bookmark locations as icons on your Android phone’s home page.

• Layers? The data on the map, like traffic, satellite view and points of interest, are called layers. Google said it would be easy for them to add more layers, so its ostensibly possible to add things like Google Latitude support and other neat tricks. Maybe they’ll open up an API for it.

• Different UIs for different usage cases: There’s a landscape and portrait mode, as well as a big-icon UI for dashboard usage.

• My fears on zero pricing, for the long term: If Google sells this in the app store for zero dollars, those millions of bucks Apple makes off of GPS app sales will likely disappear. It’s not for us to worry about until there’s no more GPS competition except Google, and we’re dependent on their pace of progress, but no competition is a bad thing. And it’s a little strange that Google’s search money is going to pay for a free map app that is competitive with stuff that costs $US100 a year from full time GPS makers like TomTom. Unfair is the word that comes to mind. But I can’t say I don’t want this App.

With Google’s increased focus on collecting map data (and less reliance on third-party map providers such as Tele Atlas) and Android 2.0’s rumoured turn-by-turn directions in the soon-to-be-released Droid, it’s feasible that they are in fact making preparations to let out a new Google product.

Android and Me, who has dubbed this app as the Google Navigator (which seems like it would fit well enough with Google’s naming pattern), predicts that we’ll see it in 2010. Forbes doesn’t care to throw out a date, but one thing’s for sure anyway: A free app of this nature from Google could definitely shake up the mobile navigation game. [Android and Me; Forbes via Engadget]

Unfortunately for nerds, the woman isn’t a robot — she still has free will. On the other hand, technology like this does have potential in navigational devices that don’t require visual cues. [Kajimoto via Engadget]

Seth at ComputerWorld, who put this together, points to a post on GigaOm last year detailing the awesomeness of PlaceBase vs. Google Maps — mainly, customisation and tons of ways to layer multiple kinds of data sets onto maps, with an API that makes it easy to layer on those data sets.

So maybe Apple wants these kind of intensive, custom geolocation mapping powers for the iPhone (and other stuff), or maybe Apple just wants to roll its own maps, so it’s not depending on Google for the tiles. Which would actually go along with the same kind of independent streak we’ve seen in other areas from Apple, like designing custom chips for the iPhone (and maybe the Tablet) using its PA Semi acquisition, instead of using the same chips anybody can buy.

If Apple’s got a new Maps app coming that’s totally un-Googley, does that mean we can finally get a real Latitude app, since it won’t confuse us anymore? Either way, Apple’s definitely doing something with their new toy. [CW]

Japan’s Ubiquitous Entertainment have developed a prototype device called ARider that allows cyclists to navigate via their iPhone 3GS using a heads up display. Of course, the whole setup seems a bit precarious for you and your precious phone.

First of all, using a HUD while cycling is inherently dangerous — but the display is retractable, so it’s not like an eye is dedicated to it at all times. Plus, the iPhone is actually mounted unprotected on to the top of your helmet. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me, but ARider is in the prototype stage, so there is time to work out the kinks before it becomes an actual product — if it becomes an actual product. [zikkir via Core77 via Slashgear]

From the images it looks like the GPS cradle has A/V hook ups and its physical buttons let you control the device for the times you don’t want to rely on the touchscreen. The ejectable PMP seems to have 3D mapping and audio and video playback. One of the images shows a TV tuner hook up. No idea on how much on board storage it has. I’m hoping for a good 8 gigs. I’d love to be able to take this thing out of the car, load it up with tunes and vids, and then pop it back in for a road trip.

I wish I could say it was headed to the here but it looks like the device is only meant for the Korean market at the moment. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it is an awesome idea that I want to be in car dashboards NOW. [Slashgear via PMP Inside]