Integrating Google Places and Google Maps

[Coop1969]

One feature I love on my Garmin is the ability to easily bring up a screen showing restaurants, parking, hospitals, ATMs, etc. By selecting a category, it will list them in order of distance. I can't find an easy way to do this in Google Maps. Is Google Places the best way to accomplish this? Is there a way to integrate Google Places into Google Maps? Is there a better solution?

[iPirate]

Google
at the top click on "local"
and it has something similar to what you are looking for

[FunN4Lo]

One feature I love on my Garmin is the ability to easily bring up a screen showing restaurants, parking, hospitals, ATMs, etc. By selecting a category, it will list them in order of distance. I can't find an easy way to do this in Google Maps. Is Google Places the best way to accomplish this? Is there a way to integrate Google Places into Google Maps? Is there a better solution?

On your Droid bring up a map screen.
Menu>>My Location to set your location
Menu>>More>>Labs>>Popular Categories

Then back to map screen
Menu>>Search and a list with restaurants, gas, lodging, ATMs etc appears. Pick what you want and it populates on the map

[SGTiger]

On your Droid bring up a map screen.
Menu>>My Location to set your location
Menu>>More>>Labs>>Popular Categories

Then back to map screen
Menu>>Search and a list with restaurants, gas, lodging, ATMs etc appears. Pick what you want and it populates on the map

Just to add to this:

After it populates on the map, a list icon appears on the bottom left. Click it and it lists the ATMs (for example) and the distance from each one.

[techguru]

Quick note. If this doesn't appear on your Droid, you need to update Google Maps. The problem is that since Maps is embedded, it won't show "Update Available" in the market until you update the first time, so search the market for Google Maps, install it, and then you will have all the new features and get notified when future updates available.

If you have to hard reset, you will need to do this again.

Alan

[Coop1969]

Quote [On your Droid bring up a map screen.
Menu>>My Location to set your location
Menu>>More>>Labs>>Popular Categories

Then back to map screen
Menu>>Search and a list with restaurants, gas, lodging, ATMs etc appears. Pick what you want and it populates on the map ]


Thanks everyone. This is great information. When i tested it, it doesn't look like this option is available if I'm in the middle of a route, only when I initially pull up Maps. Is there a way to get this functionality in the middle of a route, so halfway through a trip I can tell it to find me the closest restaurant that serves barbecue or something.

[gatorbait]

Quote [On your Droid bring up a map screen.
Menu>>My Location to set your location
Menu>>More>>Labs>>Popular Categories

Then back to map screen
Menu>>Search and a list with restaurants, gas, lodging, ATMs etc appears. Pick what you want and it populates on the map ]


Thanks everyone. This is great information. When i tested it, it doesn't look like this option is available if I'm in the middle of a route, only when I initially pull up Maps. Is there a way to get this functionality in the middle of a route, so halfway through a trip I can tell it to find me the closest restaurant that serves barbecue or something.

I don't know if this is what you are looking for, but you can search within maps or navigation at any time during your trip. So, if you are in the navigation app and want to find the nearest barbeque, push the search button and type in "barbeque". It will populate your navigation app with pins for all the closest bbq restaurants and also give you an option to view them in a list.

[christim]

I did this for Pizza and all the pizza places showed up near me. (as expected)

A couple days later I went into "layers" and discovered I now had a "pizza" layer.

I think we got the update since then, and I've also rooted to SG4.5 so I don't know if it still does this or not.

Still works: I just said "locate pizza" and then up came "map of pizza". I closed maps. I opened maps, went to layers and now there is a "pizza" layer....no extra cheese though.