Hasta La Gadget!

A German trial, which is seeing Google and Motorola battle Microsoft, appears to be going badly for the search giant. So badly, in fact, that a German judge has stated that he’s “inclined” to ban Google Maps in the country. More »

Google Maps for iOS received its first major update today. Google Contacts are now integrated into the app, so it’ll now show your contacts’ addresses on the map when you search for their name. Plus, local search results have been improved, allowing users to narrow down options by choosing from categories like restaurants, etc.

What’s perhaps the best part about the new Google Contacts feature is that Google Maps will import your contacts’ addresses from your Google account, so there’s no need to keep the addresses stored on your iPhone. However, you will have to be signed into Google when using Google Maps in order for that particular feature to work.

The improved local search options include a section called “Nearby Places” where you can browse and discover new places that are near you. Categories consist of restaurants, bars, hotels, post offices, gas stations, and more. It can certainly be helpful in your hometown, but it can be an asset if you’re roaming around in unfamiliar territory.

Google Maps made its return to iOS back in December by releasing a completely native app. This came after Apple ditched Google Maps in favor of their own mapping solution when they released iOS 6 back in September. YouTube was also ditched, but Google quickly released their own YouTube app to make up for the loss.

Google Maps for iOS updates with Google Contacts, local search improvements is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft has announced that Bing Maps has received a major update, with in excess of 13 million square kilometers of satellite imagery being updated. With the updates, the base satellite imagery is now comprised of 15 meters per pixel, giving a high-resolution look at the world from the comfort of your laptop or mobile device.

With the updated resolution, users can now zoom in to Top of the World imagery to a 13x level, at which point further zooming will pull up high-resolution satellite images. More detail is also visible in certain locations now thanks to cloud reduction, which removes clouds from locations where they are often present, revealing the details below them.

The base satellite imagery was provided by TerraColor, while bathymetric imagery has also been added, which is basically underwater topography. Because of this, oceans no longer look like endless blue swatches of water, but instead have coloring to indicate depths and mounds of the ocean floor. This provides quite a bit more detail than was previously available, which you can see represented in the image above.

Finally, there has been a release of additional Global Ortho imagergy to the tune of a tad over 203,000 square kilometers. This amounts to a total of 11,001,500 square kilometers, of which there is 100-percent coverage of the United States and 90-percent of Western Europe. Global Ortho imagery is high-resolution orthophotos that were taken “straight down” from an airplane.

[via Bing]

Bing Maps updated with 13 million square kilometers of updated imagery is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This map, put together by China File, plots all of the publicly available suppliers who fuel Apple’s production lines. While the majority are found in Asia, it’s interesting to see that the rest of world represents, too. More »

While it’s not for us to suggest that state boundaries are in any way arbitrary, artist Neil Freeman has re-imagined what a map of the US would look like if each and every state had an identical population count. More »