A couple of weeks ago (I've been on holiday, ok!) Google released an update for Maps for Android to version 5.8, from which you can now upload photos of a place directly from your device, a feature which also hooks in nicely with Picasa too. You can also add brand new places for checking in in the new version, but the most interesting feature for me though was the ability to properly view your "starred places" at long last. There's still some way to go though, particularly when you consider a big draw to Android devices is the free turn-by-turn navigation i.e. "sat nav", and dedicated sat nav devices have much better and more intuitive ways of storing favourite places.
Favourite places for Google are effectively "starred items", which in turn need to be based on real addresses, something already defined as a place in Google Maps, or a set of coordinates. You can leave them to be named by their address/Google Place name/coordinates or rename them to something memorable to yourself, something I always do as a friend or customer's name means a lot more than an address, and that's how you store favourites in your standalone sat nav. Before Google added the My Places tab to Maps for the desktop the only way to manage your starred items was the little known Google Bookmarks site, and not many people would have intuitively found that, I know from experience of helping friends and family! My Places in Google Maps for the desktop is a huge improvement to that however, and can be found very easily.
The new "My Places" area of the mobile app shows you your starred items, but you can only view and not edit them from there, which is a real shame and hopefully will be added in future. Also more frustratingly, the My Places area only shows the address/coordinates of the starred item, not your own descriptive name for the place, as shown in the app's screenshot above. So when I'm looking for customer XYZ or Jim or Bob in my list, I instead get a long list of addresses not knowing who is who!
So yes Google this is a step forward, but for those of us wanting to use your phones as sat navs, as you presumably intend us to (despite it still being in beta at time of writing), please let us edit and view our starred places properly on the device?
Favourite places for Google are effectively "starred items", which in turn need to be based on real addresses, something already defined as a place in Google Maps, or a set of coordinates. You can leave them to be named by their address/Google Place name/coordinates or rename them to something memorable to yourself, something I always do as a friend or customer's name means a lot more than an address, and that's how you store favourites in your standalone sat nav. Before Google added the My Places tab to Maps for the desktop the only way to manage your starred items was the little known Google Bookmarks site, and not many people would have intuitively found that, I know from experience of helping friends and family! My Places in Google Maps for the desktop is a huge improvement to that however, and can be found very easily.
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| "My Places" area of Google Maps for Android 5.8 |
The new "My Places" area of the mobile app shows you your starred items, but you can only view and not edit them from there, which is a real shame and hopefully will be added in future. Also more frustratingly, the My Places area only shows the address/coordinates of the starred item, not your own descriptive name for the place, as shown in the app's screenshot above. So when I'm looking for customer XYZ or Jim or Bob in my list, I instead get a long list of addresses not knowing who is who!
So yes Google this is a step forward, but for those of us wanting to use your phones as sat navs, as you presumably intend us to (despite it still being in beta at time of writing), please let us edit and view our starred places properly on the device?
Source: Google Mobile Blog
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