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.