Virtual Earth Mobile 1.69 released

Virtual Earth Mobile is a funny beast. Microsoft doesn’t appear to push it, support it, or beta test it. Instead one guy, Jason Fuller, takes it upon himself to not only release and occasionally update, but to provide the source Visual Studio product.

The product itself is really good, and definitely a program to show off the capabilities of your device.

Virtual Earth Mobile Large Screenshot

Rather like Windows Live Local, VEM is a small application which allows access to the Virtual Earth servers, with mapping and decent quality aerial imagery too. The original release of the program wasn’t terrible, but suffered some annoying bugs, and in my experience struggled to maintain a connection to the servers.

The new version is very much improved. A brief overview of the updates are listed below (taken from Jason’s blog)

For those of you who asked to be able to drag the map with the stylus, I’ve finally gotten around to implementing it.

I also added the option of getting directions in text form, for those of you who prefer written directions.

And I fixed a bug in “Add to Contacts” that appeared because the server is no longer returning zip codes.

Virtual Earth Mobile 1.69 can be downloaded from the Windows Mobile Team Blog.

[Technorati tag(s): smartphone, Pocket PC, Tracy & Matt, Virtual Earth Mobile, Windows Live Local]