Steve Cote: APP OF THE DAY: gMaps for WP7

Saturday, June 18, 2011

APP OF THE DAY: gMaps for WP7

Looking for an alternative to Bing?
APP OF THE DAY: gMaps for WP7. Mobile phone apps, WP7 apps, GPS, App of the day 0

As our dependence on technology increases by the day, skills that were once common place are slowly becoming all the more rare. It was only the other day that a fellow Pocket-linter was asked to write his name (yes, using a pen and paper) with the resultant scrawl (example below) a case in point on the growing dependence on the keyboard.

However, on with our app of the day which excels in the art of mobile navigation; map reading another skill which given time will be cast into the depths of room 101.

gMaps

Format: WP7
Price: Free
Where

The location service that is provided through Bing, and is available as standard on all the WP7 handsets, is very polished so to make downloading a navigation app viable it needs to be at least as good. Fortunately this is the case with gMaps which not only runs very smoothly, but gives you a host of options which makes getting from A to B that bit easier.

There are options as to whether you're travelling by car, public transport or on foot as well as a variety of overlays which includes traffic, giving a colour code which indicates trouble spots. Although this isn't a turn by turn mobile navigation app.

There are a lot of different views to be had, including street, hybrid, physical, wateroverlay and the obligatory satellite, with quick options to "find place", "track me" and "clear map".

However, if we were being picky we'd have to say that Bing is the cleaner of the two, but then gMaps has the more options; search seemed to have roughly the same accuracy. As such the gmaps free download might work best as a decent packup to your Bing maps if you require that little bit more info. An ad-free version is also available for 79p.