Google just made it a little bit easier to get around in London without a car. The company has added public transportation directions for London to all of its Google Maps products.

That means if you’re using Google Maps for Android, iOS, or BlackBerry or Google Maps in a web browser you can get step by step directions for getting from one place to another by bus, tube, or foot.

Android users can also fire up the Google Maps app to use the recently launched transit navigation beta feature which will let you know when it’s time to exit the vehicle or catch a transfer.

All told, Google offers transit directions for 447 cities including a number of locations in the US, Canada, and Europe

Flight and hotel search service Hipmunk has announced the launch of its new iPad app, Hipmunk Flight Search, which is now available as a free download in the App Store. The release was accompanied by an update to the iPhone app that Hipmunk released in February.

The app is designed to function similarly to the Hipmunk official website’s experience. Flight results are sorted according to those with the “lowest amount of agony,” an index that’s determined by the flight’s duration, price and number of layovers. The interface even has the same visual timeline format for displaying search results as Hipmunk’s website.

Other features include a handy option to book your flights in Safari, or you can save your selected flight with a finish code to complete your booking later on a PC. You can also email booking links to friends and re-run recent searches.

All of the new features are completely optimized for iPad, meaning the UI will feel distinctly better than using the normal website on your device. The update for the iPhone version includes a refreshed interface with smoother controls, as well as bug fixes. You can download the now universal app for iOS for free in the App Store.

via the Hipmunk Blog

Google has rolled out an update to the mobile web version of Google Maps, offering many of the features that were previously only available in the company’s native iOS and Android apps.

You can now visit maps.google.com in your phone’s browser and view your current location, search for nearby businesses or attractions, get driving, transit, biking, or walking directions, and view traffic and other layers.

The app also shows Place pages with photos, business hours, user ratings, and other information. And if you’re signed into your Google account you can view starred locations or My Maps.

The new features are available in Android and iOS mobile web browsers.

The update is part of a growing trend toward mobile web sites offering more app-like features. Google recently rolled out a more powerful version of Google News for mobile which uses your location to find local news, and Twitter’s mobile web site now looks an awful lot like a native app.

Unfortunately the updated version of Google Maps is much more resource-intensive. When I tried out the app on my iPod touch the browser crashed repeatedly — something that rarely happens when viewing other web sites in the mobile browser.

Google has launched an updated version of Latitude for iOS that adds support for check-ins. The company added check-ins to the Android version of Google Maps earlier this month.

Google Latitude is a service that lets you see where your friends are on a map in real-time. But if your friends haven’t turned on the feature in a while you end up looking at list of stale locations where your friends were last week or 6 months ago. The new check-ins add a little spice to that list by letting Latitude not just track your physical location, but also whether you went to a restaurant, bar, coffee shop, movie theater, or other business.

One of the cool features in the way Google Latitude handles check-ins is that the app is constantly tracking your location anyway, so it can automatically check you out when you leave a location.

Google Latitude for iOS is available as a free download for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch, and the iPad. You’ll need a 3G capable device to use the background updating feature.

Google has also updated Google Places for iOS to support 30 different languages.

Say you’re walking down a city street with an iPhone in hand. You can fire up dozens of apps that will let you find a sandwich shop, historic marker, coupon, or other item. And now you can also listen to people tell stories tied to the place where you’re standing, thanks to a new app called Broadcastr.

The app lets anyone create an audio recording for a location and share it with the world. Then when other users are wandering by, they can fire up Broadcastr on their phone and listen to your story. Right now there aren’t all that many recordings for the Philadelphia area, where I tried out the app, but I found a few amusing anecdotes from users, a public radio story from my local NPR member station, and what sounded like an ad for a local hospital.

I worry a bit that as the audio landscape gets more crowded we’ll start to find more ads and fewer engaging stories. But right now Broadcastr is a lot of fun to play around with, especially if you’re a public radio junkie looking for people telling their own stories in their own voices.

You don’t have to limit yourself to listening to audio recordings in your area. You can also zoom out on the map to find recordings from around the globe. And you can sort by category, with recording about crime, college, childhood, or citizen journalism — and that’s just in the “C” section. There’s also a featured section, which will help you find some of the best recordings.

Broadcastr currently offers a free app for the iPhone, with an Android app coming soon. You can also access Broadcastr’s interactive web site from a desktop web browser.

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Hipmunk is a web-based service that lets you search for flights across multiple airlines. Of course, that hardly sets it apart from dozens of other services, but Hipmunk has a few things going for it that have gained the service a loyal following:

1. Flights are plotted out on a graph showing price, flight time, and length of trips.
2. There’s an “agony” index which takes into account the price, number of stops, and duration of a trip.

Now Hipmunk has gone mobile with the launch of a free iPhone app. It offers all the features you can find at the Hipmunk web site – save one. You still need to fire up a real web browser to actually book your flight, so the Hipmunk app will shunt you off to Mobile Safari to make your reservation. The good news is if you don’t relish the idea of tapping out your payment info on your iPhone keyboard, you can also have Hipmunk shoot you an email with a link to click to book the reservation so you can finish on a computer.

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Up until today, Google Places was one of the best Android-only features of Google Maps. But now Google has rolled out Places for iOS, letting iPhone users find nearby restaurants, coffee shops, ATMs, gas stations, and other spots with just a click or two. You can also customize the list with your own search terms.

Like the Android version, Places for iPhone also uses the new Hotpot service, which lets you rate locations and view personalized recommendations from your contacts.

The Google Places app is available as a free download for iOS. Interestingly, it’s a standalone app and doesn’t come bundled with the Official Google app, even though that app includes Google Maps.

GPS navigation apps for the iPhone are  a dime a dozen these days, but somehow one of the biggest names in GPS hasn’t launched an iPhone app… until now. Today Garmin has released a GPS app for iOS called StreetPilot.

The app runs $39.99 and provides maps and directions for the US and Canada. It also offers voice directions, traffic alerts, road closure information, lane assist, and speed limit notices.

The app will require an internet connection, since the maps are stored online. This makes sure your maps are always up to date, but as I’ve learned from relying on Google Maps navigation on Android, this can be a pain if you need to reroute your trip after driving into an area with poor wireless coverage.

via BGR