Google’s New Maps App for iPhone Won’t Come for Months

If you’re anxious to get your hands on Google’s new Maps app for the iPhone and iPad, it looks like there is a wait of at least a few months.
According to a new report from the The New York Times, Google is working hard to finish the app by the end of the year.
The news comes a little more than a week after Apple pushed out its new iOS 6 software update for mobile devices, which replaces the previous Google Maps app with one designed in-house.
Apple’s new Maps app has been widely criticized for omitting transit directions, incorrectly identifying locations and incomplete 3D views that display some national monuments very oddly, such as the Eiffel Tower. There are also some broken roads and satellite views that display nothing but clouds.



The poorly reviewed Maps app has many wondering when Google might release a new app for iOS. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday in Japan that the company hasn’t yet submitted a Google Maps app for the iPhone to Apple for approval. Once it’s submitted, it could take Apple some time to approve and release the app — standard practice for the company.
That is, if Apple even accepts Google’s app.

Facebook Testing Automatic ‘Photo Syncing’ Feature For Android Phones

Facebook is testing a new feature that automatically syncs the photos you take with your Android phone to your Facebook account.
Appropriately called “Photo Syncing,” the feature syncs your photos and stores them privately, allowing you to later go into Facebook and decide which pictures you would like to share.
Similar to a feature already available in Google+, on a Help page for the service Facebook says that the feature is currently only a test, and is available for some people who are using the newest Facebook for Android app.
Facebook syncs the pictures you take “as soon as you take them,” however, the app also takes into account the battery level on your phone and your sync settings before it starts uploading.


For instance, you can set the application to only sync photos while you’re connected to Wi-Fi network, rather than potentially running up a huge data bill by synching all your shots over your cellular network. Photos that are synced via cellular network are synced at a smaller size (around 100k), to cut down on the damage it does to your data plan.
Your can check to see if you have the feature available by tapping ‘Photos’ on your Timeline within the Facebook for Android app and seeing if there is a ‘Photo Synching’ option available.
If you don’t want to sync photos when you take them you can also turn the feature off within Facebook for Android.
What do you think about automatically syncing the photos you take to Facebook? Is it something you would want to do? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Google+ Has 400 Million Members

Google‘s social network Google+ has more than 400 million members, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra has announced.

Gundotra posted the news on his Google+ profile today, adding that Google+ also has 100 million monthly active users — if you count in the mobile app.

“This week we also hit an important milestone–over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+. It was only a year ago that we opened public sign-up, and we couldn’t have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months,” wrote Gundotra.

For comparison, Google+’s biggest competitor, Facebook, had 955 million active users in July.

Of course, the methodology of counting active users (as opposed to the total number of users who’ve signed up for the service) between the two companies may differ, but judging by these numbers, Facebook is approximately 10 times bigger than Google+.

That may sound like a big advantage for Facebook, but one also has to take into account that it took Facebook several years to reach 100 million active users, while Google+ managed to do that within 12 months.