Google Earth iPhone App 2.0 Available Soon

A new version of Google Earth for the iPhone is due soon, and among its new features is one with a personal touch: the ability to see maps you’ve created and/or saved in Google Maps. To make this happen, the new Google Earth iPhone app will add the ability to login to your Google account — a feature that could open up additional personalization doors in the future.

Google’s announcement today includes an example from product manager Dan Birch using the new feature to track a pair of attempts to summit Mount Ritter, in which the combination of GPS, KML, and My Maps were used together to show the summit attempts on the Google Earth iPhone app.

A more down-to-earth (pardon the pun) improvement aims to help users get through the sometimes cluttered combination of business listings, Panoramio photos, Wikipedia entries, and other icons that appear in the iPhone app.

When a user touches icons that are too close, a new screen will show them in list format for easier selection of the desired data type.

Finally, the new Google Earth iPhone app is now available in 31 languages, up from 18 in the original release.

Google says the app should be available in the next 24 hours.