Google Maps Goes European

Here's some very interesting news, via the spool:

Google/Maps now has street maps of most European cities, including quite some interestingly non-obvious ones. Saarbrücken is there, for instance, as is Milan (which would have been extremely handy a few weeks back) and, of course, the Mothership.

Best of all, of course, is an awesome data set for Lisbon, which seems to match the one in Earth but with directional arrows for traffic.

Update: João points out that we're missing public transportation markers, and that there are still a few glitches:

However, despite the new datum and street names, local searches still don't work everywhere (Paris being an exception, since I managed to find an old office I visited years back), and neither the J2ME Google/Local client nor Mobile Gmaps seem to be able to access the new data.

I can, however, view a bitmap representation of the maps on my PSP, and use the Safari debug menu to change my User-Agent string to Mac IE and get those bitmaps:

With luck, Mobile Gmaps will be updated pretty soon and I'll be able to call up a street map on my Blackberry (or even the crappy RAZR I'm testing) anywhere in Europe - then we'll start having some serious fun.