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It was only a few months ago the folks at Waze introduced the 3.8 update allowing users to easily keep up with friends on-the-go. It was a useful feature that further solidified Waze as one of the true “social traffic and maps” service they’ve been touting for years. Today, the app is seeing yet another update to version 3.9 (Android 4.0+) and introduces a nifty new feature dubbed “Places.”
Traveling to a location you’re not entirely sure is the correct place is never fun. With Waze 3.9, preview information on your destination will be shown to you when you plug an address into Waze’s navigation. This will help ensure you’re traveling to the right spot before you actually get there. Where is this information coming from? Well, from you.
Located in the Report menu, Places allows users to edit normally inaccurate or incomplete information on businesses or residential locations. Everything from whether the place has parking (and where it’s located) or a drive-thru, to adding an exterior photo that will be displayed for other Wazers when they arrive at said location. Speaking of parking, Waze will now save your parking spot for you automatically, a feature we recently saw introduced in Google Now not too long ago.
Here’s how it works. Once a Wazer has arrived at a destination, they can then add a photo or edit information on a businesses. Because Waze’s huge community will all be contributing (theoretically, that is), it doesn’t matter if you add a lot or little info — someone else will likely fill in the rest for you later.
To help incentivize the adding of Places, Waze will be paying out major points bonuses if you’re into that sorta thing. Of course, since Waze crowd sources all its data from their users, you can sleep well at night knowing you’ve made the world a little less frustrating for drivers (while essentially doing a lot of Google’s work for them).
Oh, and Waze also mentions search autocomplete now works everywhere in the world and they’ve also managed to squash a few bugs in the new update. For a quick overview on what’s new, check out Waze’s newly uploaded YouTube vid below.
Can we work on getting satellite imagery and get rid of the stupid rain reporting.
Haha that reason reporting is probably designed to feed data to backend to one day provide hyper accurate weather reports in a different app. Think about it radar predicts where reason probably is, but crowds can actually say Annette it is and isn’t raining down to a city block level
Is this even English? Who’s Annette and what is reason reporting?
I have no idea why it posted that way it’s like disqus reversed all of my auto corrects or something. Reason reporting should have been the reason rain reporting. Reason should have been rain the second time. And Annette should be where. Lol
Weather information is freely available. I’ve been clamoring for a radar overlay on these GPS apps for years. Crowdsourcing weather information such as “RAIN” does do anything but tell you where rain was.
I want to be able to punish karma whores who report on every vehicle parked on the side of the road, even if they are 15′ off the Turnpike cartway itself.
When do I get that?
I basically use it to report cops, but it’s useless given they’re long gone by the time anyone reaches that point in the highway. Ha
I think the more data the better, one day cities could use this to respond faster to broken down cars, sending tow trucks or road rangers, eliminating traffic, so you don’t need to reroute as many people.
Completely agree with the rain reporting. there are always like eight people who say it is raining, and half the time it isn’t even happening by the time i get there. What would be actually useful would be if they could combine waze with a radar/weather app that could predict the real time travel conditions along your drive.
Does it still eat your battery and data? I tried it for a couple of weeks earlier in the year but got really bored with not being able to do anything else on my phone due to my commute using 30% of my battery and stupid amount of data.
It pretty much requires you plug into a car charger while you use it to even keep battery level maybe get a slight charge.