Customize your Home and Work addresses in Google Maps with stickers.

Who has never dreamed of owning and living on board a pirate ship, a castle, a Clark Kent-like farm house? While your dream might not ever materiliazed, Google will help with the addition of a bunch of colorful stickers in Google Maps to represent your home and work. Unfortunately, it is not possible to use the stickers for anything else, like using a pizza sticker for your favorite pizza restaurant or even having Maps automatically applying a sticker based on the places you visit. Now, if the app does that that, we'll end up with Maps buried under a sticker layer.

Google also added a new tab to Maps for taxi hailing services for users to compare pickup times and prices of the various taxi service companies before you make your choice.

Check out the full change log below before heading to Google Play store to update Google Maps.

• New dedicated ride services tab. Compare pickup times and prices of Uber, 99Taxis, Ola Cabs, Hailo, MyTaxi and Gett.

• Give your home and work a personalized look with new customized icons.

• See how much you’ve walked or how far you’ve driven in your timeline

Full offline Mauritius map now available in Nokia Here Maps for Android.

Google Maps is a great navigation tool on Android and so far competition has either been lame or inexistent. But that has changed with Nokia making its popular Here Maps available for Samsung devices first, and for other Android devices recently. Don't go look in the Play store, you won't find it there. Here Maps for Android is still in beta and can be downloaded on Nokia's official Here site.

Since you will be downloading a file outside the Play store, make sure "Unknown sources" is enabled in your phone settings. If it is not activated, your phone will offer to take you there after you tap the download link. Once the download is complete, go ahead and install the app.

Tap the Hamburger inside the app (that's the three horizontal lines stacked upon each other) and tap "Download maps". In order to download, you must sign in with a Facebook or Here account; A sign up link is also available. After you authenticate, the app will get a list of maps. Tap "Download new". Select Africa > Mauritius. The file is 126.4MB in size, double the size of the Windows Phone version.

I will compare how Here Maps work on Android and Windows Phone in another post.

Enjoy offline maps of Mauritius.

Google Maps Navigation Beta available for most of Africa and Mauritius.

It's been a while since my last post. I had an exciting time working on and completing some projects that I cannot write about here. Now that those are behind me, I'm glad to be back and share with you the readers some great news about Android. The latest is about a new offering from Google.

Yesterday, Google announced the availability of their Navigation service in many African countries including Mauritius. The service is still in beta and offers turn-by-turn navigation. Google is not the first to offer similar service in Mauritius, the first being Waze, a community based traffic and navigation app, which has since been acquired by Google. I spent a few minutes with the app today and I recommend you treat it as a beta. However, for visitors, if you plan on using it, be careful as I found that some directions were inaccurate. I hope Google fixes that with the loads of information gathered by Waze.

How do I get Navigation Beta?
There is no app to download. Google Maps app is already installed on your Android phone. Activate your data connection and launch Maps and accept the use-with-caution note and you are good to go. It is that simple. Bear in mind though that Google Maps Navigation is a beta and all precautions should be taken while driving.

Source: Google