Any mobile geek has more than once craved to have access to online maps from their phone. You know, when you’re stuck in traffic and looking for directions to the nearest Sushi restaurant or to that old vintage clothes shop you saw online yesterday. Yes, the iPhone has Google Maps integration, but it won’t help you much without GPS and with the limited set of features.

Undoubtedly the best mobile maps application around is Mobile GMaps. Free as in beer, it was the first mobile application of its kind, and the several years of age and sustained development turned it into the best and most feature-rich mobile maps piece of software.

Available for J2Me-enabled devices (as I said, sorry again you iPhone owners), it currently has the most features I ever saw in a mobile application. To name a few, it has built-in GPS support, you can define custom map sources, view pre-downloaded maps stored on your memory card, online GPS tracking on www.GMap-Track.com, local search, directions, traffic info, view KML, Mobile WikiMapia, FON, Subway maps, etc. You can see maps from Yahoo, Ask, Windows Live, Open Street and, until recently Google.

What’s with Google, you say?

According to ground-breaking news, Google just sent a Cease and Desist letter to the Mobile GMaps author, asking the author to remove support for Google Maps from the application. Instead of supporting the best mobile maps app out there, the “do no evil” folks from Google decided to bully the independent hobbyist, Cristian Streng. He promptly released version 1.36 of MGMaps, which no longer provides support for Google Maps. On the other hand, an even better feature was added: define your custom maps, by using ANY map server you want. By entering the root url of any map server respecting a standard naming convention, you can therefore use any server you want.
How’s this better?
Well.. a little birdie told me a tiny secret: the new “custom maps feature” allows you to continue using Google Maps on your latest Mobile GMaps program. All you have to do is to go to Settings, and define two custom maps: one for the standard Google Map, with the url http://mt.google.com/mt and one for the satellite version, with the url address http://kh.google.com/kh?v=20. Nice, isn’t it?

That’s about it. Enjoy this week’s software hack, spread the word and tell other MGMaps users the trick. Google can bully the small hobbyists, but can never stop innovation.