What Location?
Posted by Yannis Lionis on 06 Dec 2007 at 02:43 pm | Tagged as: Internet, Software
Google recently released My Location for Google Maps. The idea is that you download this to your mobile or PDA, press 0 while in Google Maps app and your (approximate) location is displayed on the map. This doesn’t need GPS, as it uses the mobile network masts to calculate your position, presumably with some triangulation.
It seems to me like a good idea - a you-are-here on the map feature for non-GPS users, and with a ridiculously easy interface. So I downloaded it to try it out, mostly to see how accurate it is. What I get is:
“Your current location is temporarily unavailable”
They say that this is beta and will not always work or be very accurate, but they’re working on it, yada yada yada. Fair enough. But I’m getting the same error wherever I am, for the past week. It hasn’t found my location once, it just doesn’t work for me. That temporarily word in the error message is starting to sound mockingly tiresome.
What gives? They don’t say anything about coverage - I’m in the UK rather than in the US, so if it’s US-only coverage it would explain it, but I can’t find anything about that on their Help Centre.
Verdict so far: Nice idea, but seriously unimpressed with results.
3 Responses to “What Location?”
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I downloaded yesterday the new Google Maps on my mobile. It worked ok for me so it looks like UK is included. The location was more or less accurate (somewhere between Blackfriers and Cannon St stations). I think your problem with “location temporary unavailable” might be caused by the mobile operator you use which maybe is not integrated with location agreegator Google uses for this service.
Piotr happens to be sitting 2 feet away from me right now (we work together) and we compared notes. It’s not the network provider, as we have the same one. So perhaps the version?
Piotr has a Nokia phone with Symbian OS, and his Google Maps version is 2.0.5. I have an HP iPAQ with Windows Mobile OS (I don’t know what I was thinking) and the latest Google Maps version available for it is 2.0.0. So that might be an explanation.
I remain seriously unimpressed.
[…] by Yannis Lionis on 28 Sep 2008 at 08:37 pm | Tagged as: Internet A while ago, I blogged about the (then new) “My Location” feature in Google Maps. In summary, it didn’t work for my PDA (constantly reporting that my location was […]