Something that Apple CEO Steve Jobs touched on in his original iPhone announcement back in January this year was that the handset would offer ‘traffic and directions’ among its Google Maps features. However, the subsequent demo that Apple posted on its website lacked any information about how these services would work.
However, today’s new iPhone adverts reveal that a new icon of a car (circled in red here) has appeared in the lower-right corner of the Google Maps application. This icon was missing from the Apple site’s demo (and at time of writing still is), while yet another icon with up-down arrows has appeared in the lower-left (might this browse through previous searches? Or overlay an information box?). While the new ads fail to give any details as to how the Google directions will work, we expect more info from Jobs at the 11th June Apple Conference.
In the new “Calamari” ad, the user types “seafood” into the Google Maps search field, with no location information in the search query. The phone returns the nearest seafood restaurants with no other source of information, implying that the phone knows where it is. This differs from Steve’s keynote Starbucks demonstration, where he queried “San Fransisco Starbucks” to find local Starbucks.
After going to a detail view of the Pacific Catch result, a button labeled “Directions to Here” is visible at the bottom of the screen. This could easily lead to a dialog asking “From where”, but…maybe not.
It should also be noted that AT&T currently offers navigation functionality on many of their phones without build in GPS by purchasing an external bluetooth GPS dongle and the $10/month Telenav service: