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Google recently released an update for Google Maps for Android devices, and it’s really nice.

As you can see from the video, the map ren­ders build­ings in 3D (right now for 100 cities). The map also can ren­der from directly over­head to a tilted/angled per­spec­tive (with a two fin­ger up or down swipe gesture).

 

Google Maps 5 includes the abil­ity to view the map from a sta­tic north posi­tion. Or, you can click the com­pass and the map moves as you move. You can use a two fin­ger ges­ture to rotate the map. That’s nice.

The ren­der­ing is much faster because Google has moved from map tiles to vector-based map ren­der­ing — mean­ing the maps are smaller in file size result­ing in quicker down­load­ing and smoother zoom­ing. Notice the sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence between the image tile (left) ver­sus the vec­tor tile (right) below.

An addi­tional ben­e­fit of the new vec­tor graph­ics is the abil­ity to pro­vide offline caching of maps for Google Maps Nav­i­ga­tion turn-by-turn dri­ving direc­tions. What this really means is that you’ll have offline rerout­ing in the event that you make a wrong turn and/or you’re out of a ser­vice area. Google Maps 5 report­edly down­loads 100 times less data than pre­vi­ous ver­sions. That smaller size, com­bined with local caching, should help reduce your draw of data. This i par­tic­u­larly good news for those of you with limited/capped data packages.

If you have an Android smart­phone or Galaxy Tab, give it a try.  If you use an iPhone, iPad or iPod Toch, I’m sure this update to Google Maps will be avail­able soon.