Google Latitude – Review
Google Latitude has been out for a while now. When it was initally released, I installed it on my work Blackberry, went through the menus and that was about it. I didn’t want to do any friend requests at the time for two main reasons: Privacy, and lack of interest from friends/family.
Since I’ve been spending more time lately messing with my work Blackberry (thinking of switching mobile phone carriers), I revisited the application. Here are some general thoughts on what it is, how effective it is, and what I think about that.
What it is-
Latitude is a feature of Google Maps that uses GPS and WiFi to pinpoint your location on a map and the ability to share that information with your friends & family.
What is it available on-
While it should work in most browsers, it’s mostly geared towards mobile devices. I didn’t see an easy way to use it on a desktop browser to locate yourself, but you can access it to see where your friends are from the desktop. According to Google, it works on the following device types:
Android-powered devices, such as the T-Mobile G1
iPhone and iPod touch devices
most color BlackBerry devices
most Windows Mobile 5.0+ devices
most Symbian S60 devices (Nokia smartphones)
How well does it work-
That depends on how accurate the GPS on your phone is. My GPS reception on both my iPhone and Blackberry Curve 8310 inside my work is terrible. It tells me that I’m about 1/5 of a mile away from where I’m actually sitting. That’s mostly due to the type of building I’m in. When you’re out and about, reception is much better and it’s pretty accurate.
Why do I need it-
It’s probably really geared more towards the young, social types. If you’re going out on the town, and need to meet up with your buddies, but don’t know where they are, just check their location in Latitude. No need to call everyone up. It would also be a good way to track your kids on their mobile phones when they go out so you know where they really are. There are a number of ways to circumvent the tracking, so it’s not fool proof. For me, it could be useful if my wife was running late for whatever reason, rather than call and badger her, I can just open up Latitude and see where she is. It’s probably good for stalking folks, too.
But I don’t want to be stalked-
As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there are ways to circumvent it. You can choose to manually enter your location, so it doesn’t follow you. You can also just log out of it. Another option is to set your location to city-level only. Or, just turn GPS off on whatever phone you’re using.
Pros-
Pretty much all of the reasons listed in “Why do I need it”. It’s a relatively simple app, fun to use now and again, and sometimes even useful.
Cons-
If you utilize the anti-stalker measures, you eliminate a number of the cons right there. The activation of your GPS will burn through your battery pretty quickly. If you change your status or log out, people (friends, family, spouse) will either get annoyed or suspicious. If you’re shopping for a gift for someone and they figure out you’re at Lowe’s, your alibi falls apart. If you forget it’s on and go one place but tell someone you’re somewhere else, you could get in trouble. I’m not sure about most phones, but on the iPhone, Latitude does not work with the native Google Maps application. It’s only available through the browser.
Since the iPhone doesn’t multi-task, when you close Safari, you’re logged out until you open it back up. I assume this is also the case if you just lock the phone with Safari open, but I’ve not yet tested this theory. Either way, it’s kind of annoying, but with the already mediocre battery life, we’re probably better off not burning it up with a mostly frivilous application that we might forget is running.
Summary-
Until there is some major breakthrough in it’s usefulness, I will probably not use it very much, if at all. Of the 4 people I invited, 2 are using iPhones and I doubt they’ll have their latitude page loaded up very often, and the other 2 aren’t much into these types of features. I recommend everyone at least give it a try, and perhaps one of these days, our dark overlords at Google will expand it’s use.
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