Marked by an announcement on Google’s official blog, Google’s acclaimed virtual globe program, Google Earth, was released yesterday to the Apple App store. The program, which is available for free on the store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, is a specially modified version of its desktop counterpart, and is designed to take advantage of the iPhone’s screen and special features such as tilt.

One navigates the globe by dragging one’s finger on the iPhone’s touch screen and zooms in an out by pinching inwards or outwards. The user can also tilt their phone to get 3D views of surrounding terrain features. Other features include the My Location button, which zooms the globe to the user’s current location. One can then use Google’s localized search, which is embedded with the software, to look for points of interest nearby, whose locations are displayed onscreen.

Geographic Web layers are also present on the mobile version of Google Earth. While there are a wide selection of such layers on the software’s larger cousin, including road networks, 3D buildings, National Geographic points of interest and Street View to name a few, Google Earth for the iPhone only currently supports two of these layers. They are Panoramio, which associates high quality photos from the Panoramio web site with their geographic locations; and Wikipedia, which geo-locates articles from the massive online encyclopedia. The layers can be turned on and off, to superimpose on the landscape when zoomed close enough.

Google Earth for the iPhone also has a small WebKit-engine browser which displays in-application the information that users click on through the layers, or find through search results. It also includes a link to display the pages in Apple’s Safari browser which is built into the iPhone. When you click a business’s address with the local search engine, your iPhone will display the result on Google Maps, making it easy to get directions quickly.

The free application is already available in all of the 18 languages supported by the iPhone. Gradually, more languages will be added for a total of twenty two. You can check the App Store here to see if you’re on the list.

The Product Manager for Google Earth, Peter Birch, has stated that a version of Google Earth for the Android OS is also on Google’s high priority list for the near future, although there are no definite announcements to be made right now. The mobile version of Google Earth will also see new features in the future, such as 3D buildings and advanced mapping functions.

A similar application made by Earthscape has been on the App Store since last May, and although the app has dropped its price from $10 to free, it’s very likely it will lose ground fast to the official Google version.