Matt Croydon: “There goes Google, taking it to the next level again. Their latest offering is Google Local for Mobile. What they’ve done is essentially taken the Ajax model for desktop browsers and brought it the phone using J2ME. The idea is to have a fairly lightweight MIDlet (38k for the MIDP2 version) that then grabs all the data neccesary from the network.”
Actually I don’t know what’s this got to do with Ajax, since it is apparently a Java midlet and has nothing to do with either Javascript or XMLHttpRequest, but it’s a cool app anyway. Google never ceases to amaze!
A couple of notes.
I was able to install it on my Nokia 6630 by specifying “Nokia 6682″ as phone model. My provider is Vodafone IT, so I choose “Other” as provider.
Even though the level of detail it offers for Italy is nowhere near useful, I was astonished to learn that it is actually higher than what is provided by Google Maps, as you can see by confronting the screenshot above with the corresponding area on Google Maps.
I can’t wait for the day when this type of service will have enough data to be useful here too.
1 Response to “Google Local for Mobile”