It’s a pretty sexy app that even makes use of the iPhone’s built in accelerometer and you can definitely use it to increase the iPhone-envy of your friends as you can see from this screenshot.

However, after messing around with it for a few minutes you’re left wondering “Why should I keep this app on my phone?” and aren’t given much hope of an answer coming any time soon.

App Review In A Nutshell
Overall Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Who’s it for? Google fanboys and iPhone geeks looking to impress their freinds
What’s it good for? Not sure. Let me know by commenting below.
How long before I delete it from my iPhone? 2 weeks tops.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Earth, it’s a virtual globe application that you can download onto your computer that lets you explore an earth composed of superimposed satelite images and aerial photography. It was Google’s first free application that back in 2006 really made me stand up and take notice of them. I can still hear my roommate’s laughter when I incredulously exclaimed just after downloading Google Earth onto my PC “I can’t believe this is paid for entirely by online advertising!”

Back then it provided hours of fun as I explored sites like Mount McKinley in Alaska, the battleship graveyard near San Francisco bay and St. Peter’s in Rome. Even after the novelty wore off I found myself using it for business and not just pleasure. While doing some community organizing back in California, I used the satellite imagery to find out what way the houses were facing on streets to determine the most efficient routes to assign to my team who were going door to door. It turned out the east-west streets had a much greater density of houses – and I was able to determine it in 5 minutes at my computer rather without having to drive around the neighborhoods!

But it’s been years since I’ve used Google Earth and that’s largely because it doesn’t offer enough new features to replace Google Maps. Today I could use the satellite imagery within Google Maps to do what I did while community organizing back in California.

It was with eager anticipation that I downloaded the Google Earth App onto my iPhone, but unfortunately it does not breathe new life into Google Earth and I’ll probably keep using the Google Maps on my iPhone just like I do on my computer. It does offer a couple things Google Maps doesn’t like direct links to geotargetted articles in Wikipedia

or geotagged photos in Panoramio.

Plus the 3-D views are pretty cool – when you can get them to display the way you want (more on this later).

Like Google Maps you can do localized searches for businesses and services. In fact localized searches within Google Earth appear to be driven by the same engine that drives them in Google Maps.

Like the Google Maps App you can have Google Earth automatically center on your current location.

On my first-gen iPhone that uses cel tower triangulation, it reasonably accurate (within a block or three). I wish I could tell you how it works on a current-gen iPhone with GPS, but Jeb’s kept crashing every time we tried.

As you can see from the screenshots, the app definitely looks nice and has the potential to definitely impress your friends – just make sure to spend at least an hour or so getting used to controlling it through the iPhone’s touchscreen. You can pan, rotate, tilt and zoom in and out using taps, single finger swipes and two finger swipes. Only problem is that the Google Earth isn’t very proficient at distinguishing between a single finger and two finger swipe. I was trying to take in a 3-D view of the Santa Monica mountains near Simi Valley and after the app misinterpreted a few swipes I suddenly found myself in the middle of Compton!

So, the bottom line is that this is definitely not the killer iPhone app that Jeb and the rest of us have been waiting for. The not infrequent crashing shows that it’s still a little buggy; trying to navigate via the touchscreen is more than a little annoying; and aside from direct linking to Wikipedia and Panoramio it offers little more than Google Maps.