News · 7 Dec 2010 · MTW Editorial Team
Late last night Google’s Andy Rubin demoed a yet un-announced Tegra 2 powered Motorola tablet that was running Android 3.0 aka Honeycomb and the latest version of Google Maps 5 (which will be released on Android powered smartphone in the coming days). You will first see a demo of Google Maps 5 which now uses vectorized maps to allow integration better integration with 3D buildings and save some data bandwidth (note that contrary to what he says this was easely be done with non vectorized maps and standard textured maps, but Vectors are definitely a more elegant solution). Unfortunately the performance doesn’t seem to be really good (it’s just not smooth at all) but this could be related to the fact that the hardware and software is still unfinished.
You will later see how the UI looks like and also the GMail application. Once again the scroll performcae kinda sucks but this will probably/hopefully be fixed later on…
Here’s a list of smartphone that will be fully compatible with Google Maps 5:
– Samsung Galaxy S
– Motorola Droid
– Motorola Droid X
– Motorola Droid 2
– Motorola Droid Incredible
– Samsung Galaxy S
– HTC Evo 4G
– GoogleNexus S
– T-Mobile G2
THhs list doesn’t make much sense thought because the Google Nexus One is apparently missing eventhough it has the same capacitive digitizer as the Droid Incredible AFAIK.
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