Sunday, September 14, 2008

High-resolution satellite maps on your phones soon?


Geoeye recently launched a satellite that will provide high resolution (0.5 meter) satellite images to Google. This is from their press release:

GeoEye-1 will simultaneously collect 0.41-meter ground resolution black-and-white (panchromatic) images and 1.65-meter color (multispectral) images. Designed to take digital images of the Earth from 423 miles (681 kilometers) and moving at a speed of about four-and-a-half miles (seven kilometers) per second, the satellite camera can distinguish objects on the Earth's surface as small as 0.41-meter or 16 inches in size. Due to U.S. licensing restrictions, commercial customers will get access to imagery at half-meter (0.5 meter) ground resolution.


According to this Reuter's article:

GeoEye said it successfully launched into space its new GeoEye-1 satellite, which will provide the U.S. government, Google Earth users and others the highest-resolution commercial color satellite imagery on the market.


According to this Information week article:

Google has expanded its reach into space with the successful launch Saturday of a new satellite that will provide the company with exclusive images for its maps.

Although GeoEye did not mention Google in any of its announcements regarding the satellite, the search engine giant's name appeared on the satellite and company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page attended the launch, according to reports. GeoEye said it plans to sell the images to customers around the world, but a Google spokesperson said that Google has exclusive rights to the images for commercial maps.

I read somewhere that these maps might be available to Google users in 3-6 months! These might even be better than the high resolution bird's eye maps available on Microsoft Live maps. I can view Google maps and Live maps with bird's eye view on my iPhone 3G. These are nice.
Without the LCDUI Java keyboard, Sprint Instinct users can use the Google maps app but are not able to enter any text to do a search. The LCDUI update is scheduled for later this year.

1 comment:

Roadtrekkin RV Adventures said...

instinct owners can't download Google maps anymore. It just get a message saying that your phone is not supported.

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