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Google Maps with even smaller magical blue circles

Over at the Google Mobile blog, Adel and Arunesh have just updated us with some great info about a new feature added to Google Maps upcoming version. According to the entry, finding your location is going to be even more precise with the addition of the ‘My Location with Wi-Fi’ feature. 

This addition comes right after the location team released new optimizations that enhanced the abilities of Google Maps to calculate your location even more accurately. 

My Location with Wi-Fi works pretty much similar to how your location is calculated based on Cell tower information. In this, information transmitted by Wi-Fi access points is used to calculate your location. Theoretically, since the range of the routers are very small compared to that of a cell tower, the location info calculated is more accurate.

However, they go onto mention that even though WiFi based location is available in many of the major cities in the world, the coverage and accuracy may vary. 

Is this what Ewan needed?

Do you see this as a feature that’ll change how you use Google Maps?

11 COMMENTS

  1. Here's a data point for you: If you generously attribute every WiFi access point a 100m range, the total area covered by every publicly-accessable WiFi hotspot in the world still adds up to about the size of the Isle of Wight.

    Of course WiFi location services use private ones as well, which are probably several orders of magnitude larger in number. But compared to mobile coverage it's a pathetically small area available for location services. And in dense metro areas where WiFi is dense cell spacing is normally a block or less, meaning cell location could/will do the job just as well, with far less battery drain.

    £0.02.

    /m

  2. All of which counts for shit when neither service works properly!

    This morning BT OpenZone on the Thames refused to give me an IP (as it has done for the past 2 months) and Three's mobile broadband network wouldn't connect.

    I resorted to using O2!!!…. you know something is wrong when O2 are the saviour!

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