Good news for fans of geodesy, topographic junkies, and amateur cartographers: Google recently announced upgrades for its geospatial and mapping Android apps. The updates for both Google Earth and Google Maps further optimize the popular apps by taking full advantage of the unique features found in Android-powered devices such as smartphones and tablet computers.

With the new update to Google Maps, users of portable devices running Android 1.6 and higher are now able to upload photos for Places, enter familiar descriptive terms, and add a new Place on the go. Another new feature is My Places; a system that was previously available only on the desktop version of Google Maps. My Places for Android makes it easy for users to manage and organize all the cool places they care about.

An earlier major update of Google Earth was released for Android tablets running the 3.0 version of the operating system (Honeycomb). The update optimizes Google Earth’s display on the larger tablet screens and installs a special action bar for touch-screen navigation.