Quote:
Originally Posted by
Rogifan 
I must say the hyperbole around this is almost vomit worthy. The media breathlessly reporting that this is the best app ever in the history of apps, that its number one free app on the app store (omg you don't say! I would never have expected that,!),0.
only good thing is now that its available on iOS maybe we'll stop getting news stories every time someone has a bad experience with Apple maps.
Even David Pogue, occasionally accused of being an Apple shill, has high praise for Google's iOS Maps app.
"Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic...
"The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.
Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.
So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.
You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”
Um, what?
And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/technology/personaltech/google-maps-app-for-iphone-goes-in-the-right-direction-review.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
