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Google Earth Review

Will Mathieson

We review Google Earth, Google's satellite mapping application for the iPhone

Google Earth on the iPhone allows you to find your route using satellite images

Published on Sep 3, 2009

One of Google's most popular applications has arrived on the iPhone: Google Earth offers you comprehensive satellite imagery of the entire globe, so that you can look at and locate a specific point anywhere on earth.

This app is connected to the online version of Google Earth, where existing users are constantly posting their own pictures, adding to and updating the breadth of coverage that you can gain from the application.

These annotated pictures, created via user-added content, can then become a functional point of reference for tourists, acting as a virtual map. These appear as hovering bullet points, offering a link to the photo, and serving as a point of interest on the map.

This latest version is far more efficient than previous incarnations. Early versions were renowned for being slow and cumbersome, and often crashing. This latest version seems to have eliminated these problems, and we found there were no issues with the system crashing.

What is particularly good about the latest version is the map itself, because it's rendered on a 3D plane. This means that it can be fully manipulated to suit the user, by panning, zooming and rotating the view.

The newly annotated pictures are accompanied by picture libraries, or short descriptions of famous buildings in the vicinity. This can lead to the discovery of some interesting places, marked out by previous visitors.

We thought Google Earth would be ideal for tourists travelling around a large city. Assuming there are photos of the city in question, this app could very easily be used to plan a day of sight-seeing.

Google Earth is not a quick app to use. Due to the huge amount of background data being streamed by the application, loading times are still very slow. When photos are clicked, this loading time becomes even slower.

It also lacks sufficiently detailed mapping, at street level. This could become problematic in an area with lots of small, interconnected streets. In this respect, the App is probably best used as a method for finding the general area, before switching to a city-specific A-Z.

As a free app, Google Earth is definitely worth loading onto your iPhone; it is always useful to have a map to hand, and it does provide sufficient detail to find your way around a general area.