Like many Apple patents, there's no indication (or even suggestion) that anything like this would ever see the light of day, but it does tell us that Apple is looking at doing more with marrying their hardware with maps software, just like the great improvements we saw in the iPhone's 1.1.3 update. Hardly a surprise, too, that a company so strongly turning towards portable computing is thinking about the needs of portable users. But a cool idea nevertheless, and it also confirms that Apple sees the iTS's podcast model as a strong and easy way of quickly distributing content of all kinds.
The Google Maps Plug-in for Address Book is now in a 2.4 beta edition, bringing with it a package installer (PPC only, Intel installer on its way), support for Europe and new localized Google Maps domains, as well as choosing a default country in Google Maps for the plug-in to use.
File this under "do it before they get a cease-and-desist" letter. 
That 
