You get on a bus. You know the route it takes and yet find it difficult to know when you have reached your stop. The hampering obstacle could be a tree, a signboard or fog on the windows. Sounds familiar? Google Maps for Android now has a solution to this little problem. With the help of an update, Google Maps 5.7 for Android which among other things has Transit Navigation, you can now follow the trip’s progress with GPS tracking and be alerted by the device when you need to get off the bus or need to transfer to another route.
(Image Credit: Geek.com)
The Google blog post says, “Transit Navigation uses GPS to determine your current location along your route and alerts you when it’s time to get off or make a transfer. This is particularly helpful if you’re in a city where you don’t speak the language and can’t read the route maps or understand the announcements. After starting your trip with Transit Navigation, you can open another application or put your phone away entirely and Google Maps will still display an alert in your notification bar and vibrate your phone when your stop is coming up.
Now you can spend more time enjoying the sights out the window and less time worrying about how many stops are left, where you are along the route or whether you missed your stop. Since Transit Navigation relies on GPS signals, we recommend using this feature for above-ground transit.”
Hitting the nail on the head where user reactions are concerned, Geek.com blog says, “It may not seem very important to some but anybody who has spent time in cities with large transit systems knows that taking the bus is not as simple as hopping on and hopping off a few minutes later. Once on a bus even local people might find it extremely difficult to know where they are and this means that visitors often find it just shy of impossible to navigate an unknown or foreign route, so this update could mean the difference between getting lost and getting to a hotel.”
Transit Navigation is available for over 400 towns and cities, from Bangkok to Baltimore. Other changes made in the update include an easier “one-tap” method for reaching navigation functions within the app, and a new picture viewer for touristy uses.
To start using Google Maps 5.7 for Android, download the update here. This update requires an Android OS 2.1+ device and works anywhere Google Maps is currently available.
You can see Transit Navigation in action in Google’s demo video below:
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