Everything You Should Know About Google Latitude
Google latitude is a feature of Google Maps for mobile that helps you to see where your friends are in real time. You can use it from web as well as mobile.
Google latitude is available in 27 countries and 35 languages for now.
Countries:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Liechtenstein, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Language Support:
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, and Vietnamese.
Mobiles that support google latitude:
- Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
- iPhone and iPod touch devices (coming soon)
- most color BlackBerry devices
- most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
- most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
- many Java-enabled (J2ME) mobile phones, such as Sony Ericsson devices (coming soon)
Google latitude on web:
You can also view google latitude on web by Adding Latitude to iGoogle.
What Can I Do With Google Latitude?
Share locations:
Share locations with your google friends. Location sharing starts only when both you and a friend agree. Invite friends via email or easily add them from your Gmail contacts.
Share status
Create a status message and upload your photo within Latitude. It also syncs directly with Google Talk. Check your friends’ status messages to see what your friends are up to.
Contact:
Quickly contact your friends with an SMS, IM, or phone call. You can also get directions to lead you to your friends.
Things you should know before using google latitude:
Privacy:
- You can share only with friends. You must either send the person a location request by adding them as a friend or accept their location request and choose to share back your location.
- Your location is detected automatically, unless, you manually set your location on the map that will be shared with friends.
- Hide your location. No friends can see your location. Your friends will not see your photo icon on a map and will not see a location for you in their list view.
- Sign out of Latitude. You can’t see your friends and they can’t see you. Your friends will not see your photo icon on a map and will not see a location for you in their list view
- You can also remove a friend from Latitude without removing from other google services like gtalk.
- You can always choose to share only city level location with individual friends by choosing this option after selecting the friend from the map or list view.
Cost:
- Google Latitude is free to download,
- Data service costs apply. continuous location sharing uses a lot of data and . Google recommends an unlimited data plan before using this feature.
Accuracy:
- WiFi : about 200m or better.
- GPS : several meters depending on your GPS signal and connection.
- In the absence of WiFi, Google’s cell tower location database : Accuracy is dependent on available cell tower data.
Battery Life:
- You can set the frequency of location updation and it will automatically decrease the frequency when your phone’s battery is low or your location has not changed recently.
- Enabling WiFi or GPS connections will use up battery more quickly than using Google Maps for mobile’s my location feature.
Google Latitude Privacy Tips Video:
Your opinion is valued: What do you think about Google Latitude? Share your tips through comments box.
If you like the post, subscribe to my RSS
Smiles,
ShriNagesh