Google Maps on your Phone

I've already mentioned that I went into Cambridge yesterday for an eye test. The appointment was at 10am and I decided not to walk, as I'd done the day before, but took the bus instead. This was a mistake as it was running very late. I've blogged about that already on my Milton blog so I won't go through that again here. What is worth talking about though is what happened afterwards.

As I was now running late I first needed to phone the optician and tell them I was likely to be late. Their number's not on my phone but I've got a little web app on our server which lets my phone access the address book on our extranet using a simple interface so I used that to find the number¹ and called them.

So now to decide which bus stop was most optimal to get off at in order to minimize my walk/jog to their premises. I'd not thought this through in advance as I was expecting to have lots of time. Not now though.

I really needed to look at a map and hey, I've got Google Maps Mobile on my phone so while I was still on the bus I launched that. First thing was to press the "0" key, which on the latest beta has a My Location feature which uses the cell ID of the mobile phone you're on to locate you to reasonable accuracy. That worked. Good.

The obvious short cut to take was over Cutter Ferry Bridge but which road did I need to use to get to it? I wasn't sure. It's a foot bridge so the Google Maps map doesn't show it. No problem: switch to satellite view and there it is. Not only could I see the bridge but also the footpaths across Midsummer Common so I could see which way I needed to go when I was over the bridge.

As a result of doing this I was less than five minutes late.

So all in all it was a result. When I installed Google Maps Mobile on my phone it was just a geek toy, I couldn't really see me using it, but my experience yesterday really impressed me.

1. Interesting note for web page designers, if you make a phone number an anchor tag with an href attribute of "tel:" and the number then your phone browser presents this as a hyperlink and when you click it offers to phone the number for you.