Not only can it help you locate yourself and important places around you, it offers the function to share your location with others and even show reminders of hotel or flight check-ins.

Google Maps has become a ubiquitous part of most smartphone users. Google has made a bunch of changes to its maps recently including expanding its ‘Explore’ section to make it easier to find restaurants. “The first launch of Maps actually did not use Mercator, and streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality,” explained a Google employee in 2009. Google went with the Mercator system originally because it helped preserve the angles of the roads. The classic example of this is that on a Mercator map, Greenland appears larger than Africa, however on a scaled globe map Africa is 14 times larger. It means that objects around the equator appear at a relative scale to one another, but it also means that objects closer to the poles appear larger than they really are. Although this makes it really easy to print out a map, it also presents a really distorted image of the Earth. Until the upgrade, Google Maps used Mercator projection, which projects the planet onto a flat surface. Just zoom all the way out at ? /CIkkS7It8d With 3D Globe Mode on Google Maps desktop, Greenland's projection is no longer the size of Africa.

The update is only available on Google Earth desktop, the mobile version still shows the flat version. Google Maps announced the update via the Google Maps Twitter. Until now, when you zoomed out of Google Maps, the Earth was displayed as a flat surface. Understanding the world's geography just got one step easier today as Google Maps now shows the world as a globe.

Earth view maps