GottaBeMobile Software InkShow: Touch and Google Maps on a UMPC

With the release of the iPhone, Google Maps added some new features for that little heard of device. One of those features added is the ability to shift a route on the fly using drag and drop. Basically you can click on a route that is displayed and drag and drop it to the road you wish to take. That sounds very handy and also something that should in theory work on a UMPC or other touchscreen.

I thought I’d give this a shot on a UMPC using the touchscreen to see how well it would work. I used the Samsung Q1P to do this. (The Asus R2H running Vista and Camtasia Studio is just too slow to really show how this works.) In this very short InkShow I demonstrate it in both IE and Firefox.

My experiences lead me to believe that this can work on a touch screen, but on the Samsung Q1P, I had difficulty initially grabbing and also moving the desired route to another path. I certainly wouldn’t attempt this in a car while driving, and as I think you can see from the video you need to be careful where you grab the route to move it as your results can be quite interesting to say the least.

All of that said, the Google Map feature worked very well with a mouse on a non-UMPC computer, so go figure that. I wonder how well it works on those new multi-touch iPhones?