Photo: reddit user p3nsive
While most people use Google Maps for navigation, this is a great tool that makes exploring a specific location easy as pie, all thanks to the accurate imagery the Mountain View-based parent company ships bundled with the app.
Street View, for example, provides users with street-level imagery right on their desktops and mobile devices. Because it has become such an important part of Google Maps, the search giant wants to make the experience as smooth as possible. Even on a smaller screen, that is.
As discovered recently, the Street View mode in Google Maps now comes with a split-screen mode, which allows you to do two things at the same time.
First, you can browse Street View and explore the location you selected, and second, you can see the region on Google Maps to figure out the orientation and view street names and everything else.
This is an experience similar to the one on desktop, and it’s pretty clear Google wants to make using Street View more straightforward on mobile too. The biggest benefit of this update is that Google Maps now allows you to easily tell which way you’re facing or moving in Street View mode; otherwise, it might actually be hard to figure this out especially if you don’t know the area.
At this point, however, the feature appears to be exclusively available for Android users, but what’s more, Google is silently rolling out gradually to devices out there with a server-side switch.
In other words, you may not get the new Street View split-screen mode even if you’re running the latest Google Maps version on your Android device, so the only option right now is to just wait for Google to complete the rollout.
The company hasn’t officially announced this update, so we don’t know if and when it is supposed to land on iPhones too.
As discovered recently, the Street View mode in Google Maps now comes with a split-screen mode, which allows you to do two things at the same time.
First, you can browse Street View and explore the location you selected, and second, you can see the region on Google Maps to figure out the orientation and view street names and everything else.
This is an experience similar to the one on desktop, and it’s pretty clear Google wants to make using Street View more straightforward on mobile too. The biggest benefit of this update is that Google Maps now allows you to easily tell which way you’re facing or moving in Street View mode; otherwise, it might actually be hard to figure this out especially if you don’t know the area.
At this point, however, the feature appears to be exclusively available for Android users, but what’s more, Google is silently rolling out gradually to devices out there with a server-side switch.
In other words, you may not get the new Street View split-screen mode even if you’re running the latest Google Maps version on your Android device, so the only option right now is to just wait for Google to complete the rollout.
The company hasn’t officially announced this update, so we don’t know if and when it is supposed to land on iPhones too.
Google News