The Download Blog

Updated at 12:30 p.m. on September 9, 2008 with more details about Google Maps' location accuracy.

This week, Google's mobile team let loose with an updated version of MyLocation, a feature of Google Maps that geolocates your position based on cell-tower triangulation. It fixes a minor, but distinct drawback: an overly generous target.

MyLocation, which launched about a year ago, was the first implementation of its kind we've seen for a mobile app, and it gave a taste of GPS to users whose low and midgrade phones were without it--the majority of the cell-phone-owning population. However, the best MyLocation could do was inscribe you on the map within a mile radius of your actual presence. Not bad when you compare it to the entirety of global geography, but not as precise as you'd like if you're, say, on foot in bustling New York City.

Google promises that the blue bubble mapping your location will become more precise, shrinking in size if you're amid dense population. In the way of specifics, Google's knowledge of mobile towers lets the map application nail down your location relative to your position among the cell towers. While that's nothing new, improvements to Google's cell-tower database directly informs accuracy, so the more towers its got in the system, the smaller the circle can be and the closer its center will be to where you've planted your feet.… Read more

Updated at 11:50 am on 9/16/08 to clarify the role of Blueprint.

Yahoo isn't wasting time advertising Blueprint, the seasoned mobile development platform that received renewed attentions in San Francisco last week at CTIA 2008. On Tuesday, the company released the most recent fruit of Blueprint's labor, a widget for the mobile application Yahoo Go (review) that peddles Yahoo Buzz, its Digg-like social news service.

From the Yahoo Buzz widget, social newshounds can access a summary of top stories voted on in the previous twelve hours by Yahoo users' popular vote. They'll click for … Read more

Correction: The price of the app has been corrected from the original post.

Apple has told Alex Sokirynsky that he cannot distribute his Podcaster app for iPhone via the Apple iTunes store since, he reports, "it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes." This is a crime that Apple is perpetrating on iPhone users, and it is a lie, since Podcaster does something iTunes doesn't do, and it adds real functionality to the iPhone that lots of people, like me, really want.

Read more: Tom Krazit's Apple to Podcaster: No App Store for you.… Read more

Article updated 11/4/08.

There's much to admire in RIM's native software set for BlackBerry phones, but for many, the built-in document viewer isn't one of them. Word documents on most models open in a plain text monotone; serviceable, but without the benefit of formatting or the capability to edit the text.

On Monday, Quickoffice released an updated solution for business users and prosumers angling for a more familiar desktop read and the capability to edit attached documents. In addition to support for the usual Microsoft documents--Word, Excel, PowerPoint--eOffice 4.5 ($29.95 after a … Read more

Desktop password manager LogOnce has released a new way for users of the iPhone and iPod Touch to skip having to enter usernames and passwords on sites that require them. You can log in to any site for which you've saved a password just by opening up a special bookmark that plugs in your log-in credentials for you.

There's no software to install and nothing to remember. You can also wipe out any access, just in case you manage to lose your phone, or it gets stolen.

It's devilishly simple, and it works, though the setup is … Read more

Back in June, Toronto-based Viigo released a private beta of its muscled-up RSS-reader for BlackBerry phones that looked poised to take a bite out of Yahoo Go 3.0. Viigo 3.0 beta took Viigo's core RSS newsreader and made it one meta-channel of many. Alongside a proliferation of customizable news feeds there would be weather, entertainment, sports, finance, travel information, and so on. Yet the design of Viigo 3.0 beta was a mere blueprint, a placeholder of what's to come with very limited working features.

At CTIA Wireless in San Francisco (full CNET coverage) on Friday, … Read more

If you didn't already know that football season was under way, you would after glancing at Yahoo's audacious purple booth at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco, where oversize posters and computer monitors advertise Yahoo's fantasy football leagues, and where complementary gelato is scooped into small, plastic football helmets. Across the convention center aisle, mobile widgets company Plusmo has also made a nod to the pigskin with a quiet demo of the beta iPhone app, Pro Football Live.

Released Monday to the iPhone App Store, Pro Football Live beta is a thicket of teams, schedules, seasonal stats, photos, … Read more

Our hardworking colleagues at CNET have been in the thick of the action at the CTIA wireless show this week and we figure Crave readers will want in on the fun, too.

In case you haven't seen, today Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, made a whole slew of announcements about bringing popular consumer applications to the device. It already has Facebook for BlackBerry, but now RIM is expanding.

• As CNET News reported earlier this week, Microsoft Live Search will be integrated with the BlackBerry Browser.

• BlackBerry users will now be able to schedule their TiVo recordings from their phone, … Read more

Here at the CTIA Wireless conference in San Francisco, Quickoffice, historically a mobile documents viewer for Nokia phones, is showing off demos for four new iPhone and iPod Touch apps aimed at Apple's contingent of MobileMe users.

The first, called MobileFiles, will let you view e-mail attachments, including Google and Box.net documents from your iPhone, something that iPhones don't currently allow. Quickoffice is expected to launch MobileFiles as a free, view-only app in November.

Following that, Quickoffice plans to release three more applications for reading and editing spreadsheets, Microsoft Word documents, and PowerPoint presentations, respectively. Called Quicksheet, … Read more