| Review: Google Latitude puts phones in their place |
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With a company, family and an active social life, it's hard to keep up with where my family, friends and employees are at any point in time. So when I heard about Google's new Latitude location tool, I had to try it out.
As you probably know by now, Latitude ingeniously figures out where your contacts are based on the closest cell phone tower, even if they're not on a call. It works in most of the U.S and in 27 other countries -- though as soon as you're in a rural area that doesn't have phone coverage, you can't be found. Also, it's accurate only to within about half a mile. I started by getting a bunch of friends and family members to download and install Version 2.3.2 of Google Maps onto their phones (it's only 415KB, so it won't fill up your phone's memory). To make it work, everyone connected to Latitude needs to have a Google Account, which has to be set to allow their phones to be associated with their profiles and tracked. At the moment, the software supports most recent BlackBerries, some Android-powered phones, and Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile 5.0-based devices. Google is planning on adding Apple iPhones and some Sony Ericsson devices soon. You can also install Latitude on your desktop iGoogle page.
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