Starvin’ Marvin

I bought an Ipod Nano. I love it! Isn’t it beautiful?

Ever wondered why Google launched a mobile version of Google Maps, even for non-GPS enabled handsets? Your answer is right here. The updated version of Google Maps for mobiles comes with a new service that gives you rudimentary location information without needing a built-in GPS. The name for this new feature is My Location and is still in the beta phase but will provide your location in the map wherever Google Maps is available.

It seems that this new application takes advantage of the information broadcasted from cell towers and from the Cell ID it is able approximate your current location. Of course, this feature is pretty intrusive (google could track your location with this, but hey, they already can track what search for and you care do you?), so if you are a privacy freak, don’t use this. Nevertheless, this is a innovative piece of software and very useful if you don’t have a GPS enabled hanset.

I’ve tried the feature in Lisbon, and it work pretty well, giving me an accuracy of about 2km in my tests. I must confess I was not expecting this to work here in Portugal, because I thought Google wouldn’t have geolocation of cell IDs used here in Portugal, but it seems that they already have a huge database with this. I wonder how they built this database… Did they bought this information from operators or did they gathered this info by wandering around?