Google My Tracks: Android gets GPS

Google on Thursday released an application called My Tracks that turns the T-Mobile G1 Android phone into a fully-fledged GPS receiver.

The free software can record tracks showing where you've been, display them on a map, show elevation gains and losses, and share data with various online services.

The GPS-enabled G1 can show your position on Google Maps -- either in map mode or satellite-image mode -- as long as it can find the Internet. Track data can be saved not just as a GPX file, but also uploaded and shared with Google Maps. And statistics can be uploaded into Google Docs spreadsheets or even Twittered (for example, using the Twidroid application).

In a blog post announcing My Tracks, Dylan Casey, a Google product manager and former professional cyclist, said the software began as a 20 per cent project -- one of the ideas that Google lets its engineers pursue when not working on their official job assignments.

The application works in the background, even when the phone nods off.

"The application only draws additional power when a track is being recorded. If you want to save power you must stop recording your track," said Sandor Dornbush in a discussion board post. "When you are out and about just let the phone go to sleep as normal. My Tracks will run in the background even if the screen is off."

The G1's battery is good for about 5 hours of recording, according to Google.