Using the interface know how of Google and highly detailed satellite maps makes for a fantastic user experience, the screen is split into a main search bar, layouts bar and the map view with a toolbar at the foot. As you'd expect with Google there is no need to reach for the instructions, starting the application brings up the globe which you instinctively click on and start to move left and right. Having got ourselves over blighty we used the centre mouse wheel to zoom into London, there right in front of us was a birds eye view of good old London town and in amazing detail too. It does set your mind racing that if we mere civilians can have this level of access what can a military satellite see!

To aid navigation of the globe you can use the Google search technology to show you the right corner of the globe, again we went for London and tried a few famous monuments and roads, each time Google maps finds the place on the map and took us to the exact location. Its at this point we tried outside London and discovered the variability of mapping detail, in fact looking at the whole UK you can easily see the areas that have been mapped in much closer detail.

In one area of London you can see cars parked and even the outline of shoppers in Oxford street, yet in the outlying counties a zoom in just turns into green mush, the UK is quite patchy with some strange results like High Wycombe being in good detail while Southampton is in mush!

Finding places of interest is aided by the layouts tab, this contains lists of locations that can be overlaid onto the Google Earth maps, the keyhole community selections are amongst the best with us being able to locate Beckingham Palace home to David Beckham and Posh Spice, this allowed us to scope out the security and see if they were home. A number of options are also presented to overlay roads and to even get directions from your current location to the point you have highlighted on the map.

Like most free things in life there is an upgrade or premium option, here for £11 you can get a drawing option allowing you to annotate the maps and also the ability to import and export GPS data, sadly unless you live in the USA its more than likely that the map you want will be too blurry to justify £11 for the extra tools.

As standard you can store your own collection and add "pins" to the map allowing you to find your favourite locations quickly, there is the real jump to the "Pro" version for £229 which allows printing of the images in high resolution but this must be for serious geeks only. An extra and free feature for the geek community is the use of KML or keyhole mark-up language allows the technically capable user to send locations, images and camera views to other users and to create icons and write HTML tags for maps.

Clearly Google has a great idea here, we're not sure why we like this so much, its very voyeuristic but clearly it has very practical uses giving a visual representation of areas and a rather unique way of navigating between 2 points.

Download Google Earth

More details on KML

Published - 12/07/2005

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