Hurricane Sandy may have kept Google from announcing things they wanted at an actual physical event, but it sure didn’t stop them from talking about the Nexus 4, Nexus 7 3G, and more. What about Google’s very own products like Google Maps and Google Now?
Sure, we’ve heard quite a bit about Android 4.2, but it seems that there’s some goodness coming out soon with two very popular apps. The guys over at Android Police did an APK breakdown of both Google Maps and the latest Search app which revealed some pretty cool stuff.
For Google Maps, real-time traffic rerouting will be coming. What some don’t realize is Maps doesn’t already take traffic into account as you go along your trip and only when you hit the navigate button. After you’ve done that, that’s it. Now, as you travel along, Maps will calculate traffic in real-time, that way you don’t get stuck due to an accident or a number of other reasons.
Looking at several strings in the APK, if it encounters traffic, you’ll get a popup saying, “Reroute to avoid traffic?” and “Traffic ahead. Reroute to save %s via %s”. This new feature will likely use up more battery life, but it’ll also potentially save you a lot of time.
On the Google Now front, one thing that’s been lacking is that it can’t exactly hold a conversation. Currently, you just say what you want it to do, and it confirms that you said what you said and works its magic. There’s not a huge update coming on this front per say, but at least when you issue a call command, Now will ask you for confirmation.
What do you think about these changes? A great step in the right direction?