Chapter 6. Maps, Weather, and Other Droid 2 Apps
Above all else, the Droid 2 is about apps, apps, and more apps. Without them, the Droid isn’t much more than a glorified cellphone.
And what apps it has! The Application Tray is chock-full of them, and as you’ll see in Chapter 11, you can add countless more of your own. But right out of the box, the Droid 2 comes with a suite of remarkable apps, including a web browser, a camcorder, email software, a calendar, a photo gallery, and much more.
Many of these apps are covered elsewhere in this book, some with entire chapters devoted to them. This chapter covers road-warrior apps like Maps, Navigation, Weather, Calculator, and more.
The main way to get to your apps is via the Application Tray; to get there, tap the up arrow button at the bottom of the Home screen. You can access some apps, like the Weather widget, right on the panes. (For more details about panes, see Customizing the Home Screen and Panes.)
Maps
Google Maps on the Droid 2 is the mobile version of the renowned Google Maps website (http://maps.google.com). In fact, the Droid 2’s Maps app is even more powerful than the web version, since it can incorporate GPS information.
Type any address or point of interest in the U.S. (or many places all over the world), and you see a map. You can choose a street map, an aerial satellite photo, or a combination of the two. You can also find nearby businesses, points of interest, and traffic congestion. Maps can also give you turn-by-turn directions, even including public transportation in some cities.
Note
The Maps app on your Droid 2 may vary somewhat from what you see explained here. Google frequently updates its Maps app. The Maps app described here is the latest version as of the writing of this book. So if you have an older or newer version of Maps, it may vary from what you see.
Browsing Google Maps
Tap the Maps icon in the Application Tray or on the Settings pane, and Google Maps launches. At first launch, if it finds your location, it shows a map of your neighborhood with a pointer to your location. If it can’t find you, you’ll likely see a map of the United States. You can get all the way down to street level. Navigate the map by dragging or flicking.
Note
If you’ve turned on your GPS, instead of displaying a map of the United States, Google Maps will most likely locate you and display a map of your current location.
Zoom out by pinching your fingers, tapping the – button, or by tapping the screen once with two fingers (the amazing, little-known two-finger tap).
As you zoom in on the map, you’ll see locations of interest indicated—museums, libraries, schools, parks, restaurants, and so on. Tap any, and the name pops up in a balloon. Hold your finger on any, and a balloon pops up with both the address and the name.
Tap the balloon, and you come to a screen with more information, which lets you get directions to the location, search for businesses nearby, and share information about the location by email, text messaging, or direct Bluetooth file transfer.
Changing Your View
Just being able to zoom in and out of a map down to the street level, or all the way out to the continent level, is pretty amazing. That doesn’t even begin to get at all the amazing things you can do with Google Maps, though.
To get started, change your view of the map by using different layers. A layer is a different view, or information superimposed over a view. To change a view to a different layer, tap the Layers icon 
at the top right of the screen, and you come to a menu that shows you a whole lot of choices, including a satellite view, a view of the terrain, a real-time traffic map, and so on. Your current view has a green checkmark next to it. To switch to any other view, tap it.
The satellite view is self-explanatory—it’s a satellite image of the location. As you zoom in, the photo may at first appear blurry, and it may take a little while for the photo to resolve itself, so be patient.
Note
The layers on Google Maps often change, as Google adds new information and makes deals with other companies to add their layers. So check Layers often, to see what nifty new things are in store for you.
The terrain view is reminiscent of a map in a geography textbook. It shows you a representation of an area’s elevation, forests, deserts, mountains, and so on.
Traffic
The map can show you how bad the traffic is on highways and major metropolitan thoroughfares. Turn on the Traffic layer, and, where available, the app indicates traffic congestion by the following color coding:
Note
You can help Google get more accurate information about traffic in your area. Before you start driving, enable GPS on your phone (see how below), and turn on the My Location feature (see Backup Assistant). When you do that, anonymous information about your location and driving speed is sent to Google, which uses that to help figure out the current traffic conditions.
Make sure to look for small orange icons with a symbol of a man at work. They show where there is construction or maintenance going on. Tap any of the symbols, and you get a description of the work.
Buzz and Latitude
You’ll find three other options on the Layers menu: Buzz, Latitude, and, if you’ve previously used turn-by-turn directions, the last set of directions you requested. Both Buzz and Latitude are Google services. Buzz is a social networking service that lets you post your current location and find out what the “buzz” is near you, and for you to post what you think the “buzz” is. Latitude lets you share your current location with your friends, and to see their locations on your Droid 2.
More Layers
When you tap Layers at the top of Google Maps, down at the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a More Layers option. Tap it, and you get even more layers, some of them extremely useful, such as one that shows bike paths on a map, and another that shows transit lines. Keep checking back, because Google keeps adding new layers to Google Maps.
How the Droid 2 Finds Your Location
Google Maps’ usefulness really comes into play when it’s combined with the Droid 2’s ability to find your location. The Droid 2 finds where you are in three ways:
GPS. The Droid 2’s built-in GPS chip works just like the one in a Garmin or TomTom, although it’s not quite as accurate. (Hey, those devices only do GPS, not phone calls or games, so cut your smartphone some slack.) GPS works best when you have a good view of the sky. If not, the Droid 2 switches to one of the following two location methods.
Wi-Fi positioning. The Wi-Fi chip on your phone can do more than just connect you to a Wi-Fi network—it can also help determine your location. It does this by using information about Wi-Fi networks near you—information contained in a large database. Then, using the information about the Wi-Fi locations and your distance from them, it calculates your location. It’s not as accurate as GPS, but it still works pretty well.
Cellular triangulation. If GPS or Wi-Fi doesn’t do the trick, then the Droid 2 calculates your location based on how close you are to various cellphone towers near you. It’s not as accurate as GPS or Wi-Fi positioning, but it’s nice as a backup.
Tip
GPS and Wi-Fi can use up a lot of juice from your battery. When you don’t need them, turn them off.
Now that you know how the Droid 2 finds you, it’s time to tell it to do its tricks. You’ll need to tell the Droid 2 to find your location if you’re going to use any of its location-based services, such as giving you turn-by-turn directions.
Doing it is simplicity itself: In Google Maps, tap the location button 
in the upper right; just to the right of the Layers icon Google displays a blinking blue arrow to show your location.
Note
If the Droid 2 is not exactly sure about your precise location, it draws a blue circle around the blinking arrow, to show that you may be anywhere inside that location. The larger the circle, the less certainty Google has about your location.
As you walk, drive, bicycle, or move in some other way, the blue arrow moves as well. The arrow changes direction to show the direction in which you’re moving.
Searching Maps
Google Maps makes it easy for you to search for a business or other location. Given that Google is the premier search site on the Internet, would you expect anything less?
To search, type your search term into the search box at the top of the screen. When Google Maps finds what you’re looking for, it displays the location and shows a kind of pushpin in it.
There are countless ways to search the maps. Here are some of the most common:
Address. Just type an address, including the state or Zip code. Don’t bother with commas, and most of the time you can skip periods as well. You can use common abbreviations. So, if you type 157 w 57 ny ny, you’ll do a search for 157 West 57th Street, New York City, New York.
Intersection. Type, for example, massachusetts ave and cogswell cambridge ma, and Google Maps displays the location at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Cogswell Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
City. Type, say, san francisco ca, and you’ll see that city.
Zip code. Type any Zip code, such as 02138.
Point of interest. Type central park or washington monument.
Airport code. If you know the three-letter code, you can type, for example, sfo for the San Francisco International Airport, or bos for Boston’s Logan Airport.
When Google Maps finds the location, it marks it with a pushpin. Tap the pushpin for more information about the location, as explained earlier in this section.
Finding Businesses and Contacts
Google Maps can easily find local businesses. Any business that you can find with a Google search, Google maps can find, too. But Maps can also find the home and business addresses of your friends, which it does by tying into your Contacts list.
If you want to search for a business near your current location, tap the Places icon 
near the top of the screen to the left of the Layers icon. A screen appears, listing various types of businesses, such as restaurants, coffee shops, bars, hotels, attractions, ATMs, gas stations, and so on. Tap the icon of the type of business you want to display, and Google Maps will display all of those types of business near you.
Alternately, you can do a search for a type of business by typing into the top of the screen—pharmacy, for example, or bakery.
Note
When you tap the Places icon and select a type of business to display, it displays businesses where you currently are. So, for example, if you’re in Boston but you’re displaying a map of New York City, when you tap Places and ask to display restaurants, you see a map with restaurants where you are, in Boston, not in New York City. To find restaurants in New York City, you would instead type restaurants into the search box.
You see pushpins on the map, each of which represents a business in the area that matches your search. Tap the pushpin, and the business’s name appears above it. Tap the name, and you see far more detail about it, depending on whether the business has been reviewed by any users of Google’s content partners, such as Yelp.com. If it hasn’t been reviewed, you can share information about the location, type a Buzz about it, or add it as a contact. Tap “More information”, and you see even more reviews and details.
What if you want to see information about many of the businesses you find, not just one? Tapping them each individually gets to be time-consuming. So instead, tap the small note icon that appears on the lower-left portion of your screen. When you do, you see a summary of all the businesses nearby that match your search, along with reviews and address information. Tap any to get more information.
Note
You may notice that when you search for a business, ads sometimes appear in various locations—for example, at the top of the screen that gives you a business’s details. That’s one of the ways Google makes money out of Google Maps, by selling ads related to searches you do.
When you get details about a business, you see four buttons near the top of the screen. The leftmost one 
brings you back to Google Maps and shows you the location of the business on the map; the next one 
gives you turn-by-turn directions to the business; the next one 
places a phone call to the business; and the rightmost 
brings up a menu with many more selections, including Street View, which shows you the location’s street view—an amazing piece of technology that you’ll learn more about on Street View.
What if you come across a business you like and want to be able to return to it later? Simple—when you’re viewing details about a business, look for a small gray star at top right. Tap it, and the star turns gold. You’ve just put that location on a Starred Items list so you can easily find it again. You can see the star right on the map or, to see the list, press the Menu key in Google Maps, select More, and then tap Starred Items. To take a business off the list, when you’re viewing its description, tap the gold star to turn it back to gray.
Note
Your map can quickly fill up with pushpins that become very distracting. You can delete them all in a single swoop. Press the Menu key, and then tap More→Clear Map.
Locating the address of your friend’s home or business on a Google Map is easy. You can do it, though, only if the address is in your Contact list.
In Google Maps, search for the friend’s name. If you have an address for the friend, it appears in the search results. Tap it, and you’ll see the location on a map.
You can also do it straight from the Contacts list. Find the person in your Contacts list (see Choosing from Your Contacts for details). Next to the person’s address or addresses, you see pushpins. Tap a pushpin to go to the location on Google Maps, complete with another pushpin.
Getting Directions
You’ve heard the old cliché: Ask a Maine resident for directions, and the answer is inevitably, “Can’t get there from here.” Fortunately, Google Maps is much more helpful. Ask it the same question, and you get to choose how you want to get there: driving, walking, biking, or public transportation. Google provides directions for all four, or as many as it can find. (Not all types of directions are available to all places, but you’ll have more choices in major metropolitan areas.)
You can get directions in many places throughout Google Maps, and throughout the Droid 2, because that capability is embedded very deep in the phone. So expect to find directions in many different places. For example when you search for a business, find the location, and look at the page that gives you information about the business.
One surefire way to get directions anywhere in Google Maps: Press the Menu key, and then tap Directions. A screen appears, with a starting point, ending point, and icons for finding directions via car, public transportation, bicycle, and on foot.
If the Droid 2 knows your current location, it uses that as the starting point, and puts the words “My Location” in the starting point box. If you want a different starting point, type an address into the My Location box, or instead tap the little icon to the right of the box . If you tap the icon, you can choose to have Google Maps use your current location as a starting point, to tap a point on the map to be your starting point, or to create a starting point from an address in your Contacts list.
Next, choose your destination—what Google Maps calls an end point. As with the starting location, you can type a location, or else tap the icon and choose an endpoint on the map, your current location, or a contact’s address.
Once you’ve set the starting and ending points, you’re ready to go. Tap which kind of directions you want, and then tap the Go button. You see a summary of your starting point, your ending point, the distance, how long it’s expected to take, and turn-by-turn (or step-by-step) directions of how to get there.
This example uses driving directions, but the other types of directions work much the same way. You can scroll through the entire list of directions, or view them section by section on the map instead. Tap “Show on map”, and you see your starting point, the route you’ll take, and the first few directions. You can zoom in and out in the usual ways.
Tap the arrow buttons 
to get to the previous or next driving instructions. You can also return to your master list of instructions by tapping the note icon 
in the lower-left portion of the screen. In this way, you can switch back and forth between your overall directions and your current one. When you’re looking at the list of overall directions, tap any instruction, and you’ll see a close-up of the directions on the map.
Turn-by-Turn Navigation
Getting turn-by-turn directions is helpful, but the Droid 2 offers something even more powerful—turn-by-turn navigation, just like the GPS gizmos made by Garmin and TomTom.
On the directions list, tap Navigate (or, from the Application Tray, select Navigation). You’ve turned the Droid 2 into a true, full-blown GPS navigator, complete with the usual annoying robot-like female voice. But it does the job. It tracks your location as you drive, and displays it on a map. When you’re approaching a turn, it tells you what to do ahead of time. It shows you all the information you need, including distance to your next turn, current location, time to your destination, and more. So forget buying that $300 GPS unit—it’s built right into the Droid 2.
Note
The turn-by-turn navigator requires your GPS to be turned on. You don’t need your GPS turned on if you want to get normal directions on Google Maps, though.
Turn-by-turn navigation includes lots of other nice features built into it. Want to avoid highways or avoid tolls when you drive? Press the Menu key while you’re in the Navigation app, and select Options. You can choose to avoid either or both.
To get return directions to where you started, press the Menu key and then select Reverse.
Street View
Last but not least, here’s perhaps the most amazing feature in Google Maps—Street View. It’s a full, 360-degree panoramic, photographic view of streets and an entire area—an entire city, if you like. Street View is a great way to plan, for example, a walking tour of downtown Boston. (Make sure to visit the State House and its golden dome on top of Beacon Hill if you head there.)
Street View is available only after you search for an address or a business and select it, or choose a point on the map and then select it so you can get more information about it.
Weather
This handy little widget shows you the current weather for your city, or for any other major city in the world (and many minor ones, too). You can also get a four-day weather forecast.
Just flick over to the Settings pane, and the widget is at center stage. It gives a quick summary of the current temperature, the projected high and low for the day, and whether it’s sunny, cloudy, raining, or snowing.
The first time you use the Weather widget, it most likely won’t show the weather for your current city; it may show a different location instead. With a few taps, though, you can change that:
Tap the Weather widget. It shows the current weather, and the forecast for the next four days.
Press the Menu key, and then tap Settings. The widget displays the city for which it’s currently showing the weather. Tap the – button to delete that location if you don’t want to use it.
Tap the green + button to add a new location. From the screen that appears, type the city name or Zip code of the city, and tap the Search button. The Droid 2 finds the city and adds it to your list of cities. Tap Done. The widget now displays the weather for your current city. You can add multiple cities this way.
Note
You would expect that because the Droid 2 has the ability to find your current location, it would automatically see where you are, and then tell the Weather widget to display the weather for that city. Expect all you want; it doesn’t do that. Maybe in the next version, but for now you’ll have to configure it manually.
Now that your city is set, tap the widget to see more detail about the current weather, including the forecast for the next four days. If you’ve asked the widget to display the weather for more than one city, just flick over to it. A small outward-pointing triangle appears on the right if you’ve asked the Droid 2 to show more than one city. If there are no arrows to the right, there are no more cities to show. And if you’re flicking through your cities, and there are triangles on both sides of the widget, it means there are cities on both sides to flick to.
There don’t appear to be any links to tap in the widget to get more information, but don’t be fooled; there are two:
Tap Extended Forecast, and your browser launches and sends you to AccuWeather.com for more details about the forecast for your current location.
Tap any of the days toward the bottom of the display, and you see the forecast for the current day at 6 a.m., 12 p.m., 6 p.m., and 12 a.m. You would expect it to show the forecast for the day you tapped, but it doesn’t. Instead, it shows it only for the current day. To get back to the four-day forecast, tap again.
Setting Your Weather Options
There’s not a lot you can change about the Weather widget, but there are a couple things. With the Weather widget displayed, tap the Menu key and select Settings. You’re back on the screen that lets you add cities. To change the order in which the cities are displayed, tap the up or down arrow next to a city. Whichever city is at the top is the one the widget displays initially. To change the display between Celsius and Fahrenheit, select either (near the top of the screen).
Reading News
Your Droid 2 is a great news-gathering machine, and will grab news for you of any type—national, international, sports, business, entertainment, and more.
There are two ways to read news on the Droid 2:
News app. In the Application Tray, tap the News icon to read the news in the News app. You can even tell the app what kind of news you want to see, as described next.
News widget. Slide over to the News pane, and you’ll see the latest news, as well as tips and tricks for using your Droid 2. (The News widget is less powerful than the app, but you can read more about it on Using the News Widget.)
Using the News App
The News app does more than just let you read the news—it lets you tell the Droid 2 what kind of news you like reading by subscribing to news feeds.
Note
When you tell the Droid 2 what news you want to read in the News app, that news doesn’t show up in the News widget as well. Although there are some features in common, the widget operates separately from the News app.
Tap the News app in the Application Tray to launch it. You see a screen showing any news feeds you’ve subscribed to, as well as a general feed and a Tips and Tricks feed. If it’s your first time visiting the News app, the only feeds you see are the ones pre-built into the News widget.
Reading a feed is simple. Tap it, and you see a list of news articles. Tap any that you want to read, and you come to a screen with a brief summary of the news item.
From here, you can hop to the next article summary by tapping the Up button, and the previous news article by tapping the Down button. To see the original article in its entirety, tap “View original”. Your browser launches, and you visit the page where the article originated.
To get back to the news summary, press the Return key. And to get back to the news listing, press the Return key again.
Note
News articles are from numerous sources throughout the Web. For one news article you may visit USA Today, for another the New York Times, and so on, so navigation once you get there will be different.
Subscribing to news feeds
To subscribe to a news feed, tap the green + button on the page you get to when you tap the News icon. You’ve got these four choices for news feeds:
Bundles. These are pre-existing collections of news feeds about very broad topics: Entertainment, Finance, News, Science & Technology, and Sports. You’re shown the source of news for each bundle, for example Fox, Reuters, and USA Today for sports news.
Channels. These are various news and information brands, such as MSNBC, Reuters Mobile, the Travel Channel, and USA Today. Mostly, the channels have multiple types of content. For example, USA Today has news about technology, sports, money, general news, and entertainment.
Device Help. This is supposed to give you various types of news feeds that can help you get the most out of the Droid 2. At this writing, though, there’s just one small news feed. By the time you read this, that may—or may not—have changed.
Custom. Got a news source that you’d like to use on your Droid 2? Here’s the place you can add it.
The way you subscribe is almost identical for each type of content, with just a slight variation. Tap Bundles to come to a listing of all the available bundles. Then tap a bundle, such as News, and you come to all the individual feeds that make up that bundle. Green checkmarks are next to any feeds to which you’ve already subscribed. Turn off the boxes next to any to which you don’t want to subscribe, and turn on the boxes next to those to which you do want to subscribe. Then tap Subscribe. You’re now subscribed to those individual feeds.
Tap Channels, and you come to a list of all available channels. Tap a channel you’re interested in, such as USA Today, and you come to a list of available feeds for that channel. You’ll see green checkboxes next to any feeds to which you’ve already subscribed. To subscribe to any new ones, tap the feed, and from the screen that appears, tap Subscribe. To unsubscribe to any, tap the feed, and from the screen that appears, tap Unsubscribe.
Subscribe to feeds for Device Help in the same way, although there’s currently only one feed to subscribe to, and you’re subscribed to it automatically when you first turn on your Droid 2.
Your final choice, Custom, requires a bit more knowledge. You first need to know the news feed or web page to which you want to subscribe. Tap Custom, and you get the following choices:
RSS Feed. The Web is full of RSS feeds that can automatically feed information to a computer or to your Droid 2. Each RSS feed has its own URL. To know whether a blog post or other page has an RSS feed associated with it, look for this orange icon:
.To subscribe to an RSS feed, you need to enter its URL. If you know its URL, simply tap it into the box that appears when you ask to add an RSS feed. To avoid all that tapping, when you come across a page with an RSS link on it, press on the feed link, and from the screen that appears, select “Copy link URL”. Then, to get to the page to subscribe to an RSS link, hold your finger in the text input box, and from the menu that appears, select Paste.
Web page. Many web pages have feeds associated with them. To subscribe to a page, tap in its URL—you don’t have to include the http://. In some instances, the page will have RSS feeds associated with it, and if that’s the case, when you choose to subscribe to the web page, the Droid 2 will notify you, and ask which you want to subscribe to.
When you’re done adding all your bundles, channels, and custom feeds, you see them displayed in the News app, including the total number of new stories for each. Tap any feed to read it.
Using the News Widget
The News widget, over on the News pane, gives you a quick way to read the latest news. It displays the latest news story at the top of the screen, along with a feed of Droid 2 tips and tricks. (At this writing, a disappointingly small number of tips and tricks are available.)
Note
Get to the News pane from the Home screen by sliding your finger to the left and moving through the panes until you reach the News pane, which is the third pane on the right.
Tap the News widget to see a brief summary of the news story. To read the summary of the next news story, flick to it; to read the previous, flick back. Arrows appear on either side of the current news story to show you if there are earlier or later news stories to read.
To read a full news story, tap the arrow on the summary page, and you go to the website, where you can read the entire story.
You can add news feeds to the widget in the same way that you can add them to the News app. When you’re reading a news summary, tap the Menu key and select Options. You come to a screen that shows your current feeds and lets you add and delete feeds in the same way you can add them in the News app—tap the green + button and follow the instructions outlined earlier in this chapter for the News app, or tap the – button next to a feed to delete it.
Note
The News widget doesn’t share its settings with the News app, so you’ll have to customize your feeds for the News app and the News widget individually.
The Options page also lets you select how many days’ worth of stories you want the News widget to display. Out of the box, it displays stories for only the current day. But tap the arrow underneath “Show items for”, and you can change that to display them for other amounts of time—all the way up to a month.
If there are no unread articles displaying in the News widget, you can still change its settings, and add and take away feeds. Tap the News widget, even though its content is blank, and select “Widget settings”.
Calculator
Like any computer, the Droid 2 includes a calculator. So the next time you need to find out the square root of 547 (it’s 23.388031, by the way), or simply figure out how much to leave for a tip, you’re all set. Unfortunately, that’s about all it does. You can’t paste results from it into the Droid 2 clipboard. Still it’s a useful little app.
Launch it by tapping its icon from the Application Tray, and you see a basic, four-function calculator. Tap in an equation, like 67.5 x 32 =, and the answer appears at the top.
The Calculator does much more than basic math, though. You can also use it for more complex calculations such as sine, cosine, tangent, square root, and so on. To get to them, press the Menu key, and then choose “Advanced panel”. To get back to the basic panel, press the Return key, or press the Menu key and choose “Basic panel”.
