Google Maps on Android will deliver a totally new experience for users through features that allow exploration of new and favorite places.

Google Maps for the T-Mobile G1 takes advantage of the phone's hardware such as touch screen, accelerometer and GPS. It also takes advantage of the phone's system integration made possible by the Android platform.

"If I want to see a restaurant or building up close, I can switch to Street View and view a panorama from street level," said David Conway, product manager of the Android Team at Google, Mountain View, CA in his blog.

"I can even turn on Compass mode to let me look around the panorama by moving my phone up, down and to the side," he said. "It's like popping up a virtual periscope anywhere you want to check out what's there with your own eyes."

T-Mobile announced the world's first Android-powered phone on Sept. 23 (see story).

The phone comes preloaded with Search, Maps, Gmail with Contacts, Calendar, Google Talk, and YouTube.

The Maps application, specifically, lets users take advantage of GPS when in a new city or part of town.

Users can turn on My Location, which uses the phone's GPS to map the exact location.

"And as I wander the city, I can search for nearby businesses (like restaurants) and use Android's integrated Map features to save search results to my contacts," Mr. Conway said.

"For instance, if I find a restaurant that I like, I can save it to my contacts and then later on call it or Map it with one touch," he said. "In the future, when I do another search with Maps, I might even see this contact again as a suggested search result alongside past queries."

Maps is integrated with email, IM and the Internet on Android.

Street addresses that appear as plain text in these applications become touchable zones that can be clicked on to take the user straight to Maps.

Something similar happens when a Google Maps link is pasted into an email, IM or placed on a Web page.

"When I touch it, I can choose whether to view the map in the browser, in Google Maps, or in any other application that's built to handle what's known to Android developers as an intent," Mr. Conway said.

"Or, I can make the choice once and save it as my default map-viewing application (Google Maps, in my case)," he said.

Most of the resources and functionality in Google Maps are available to any application written for Android.

For example, Cab4me and Locale are both Android Developer Challenge winners that used the Android platform to build applications with maps and location at their core.

Any developer can use Android's MapView and location APIs to build location-aware mobile applications like these.

"While the team is proud of Google Maps on Android and other cool applications we've seen to date, we're equally excited to see what new kinds of maps and location-enabled applications developers create in the coming months," Mr. Conway said.