Google Maps on the Motorola Droid are the most accurate maps you can have on a phone... providing you can stand the constant app crashes and the battery only lasting 2 hours.
I reported a problem near my house in the south of france sunday evening about 8:00 and when I looked this morning about 10:00 it has changed. and again since this morning several other things have changed. Thats the fourth change I have noticed within 2 miles of my house since updating to iOS6 on wednesday.
Or economics. I wonder how much Apple has had to pay Google for these last five years of lookups. It's interesting to me that they never tried to allow turn-by-turn from Google. I assume this is a decision made years ago and someone had to make the call to dump Google Maps and go with this built-in approach. Google has had a serious head start but at some point Apple had to introduce this. It may have been messy to do this later. I can't imagine this will be "fixed", whatever that means, for some time to come.
To be fair, they've built a world-wide map from scratch. Few companies would have the audaciousness, skill and money to do this. The maps team has done a fantastic job with most of this. Flyover is really fantastic and presents another approach beyond street-view from Google. There are some serious glaring mistakes that will be an Achilles heel for some time to come but Version 1 is more than usable for most of us, I assume. It's great in my little part of the world.
apple tried to get turn by turn from google in 2009 but google wouldn't agree, hence apple making it's own version. With the recent price hike, and 50% of google maps customers being iOS users, your economics makes lots of sense - source
apple must have know their licence was running out tho, ? did they no anticipate the price hike and short contract being refused.?
Or economics. I wonder how much Apple has had to pay Google for these last five years of lookups. It's interesting to me that they never tried to allow turn-by-turn from Google.
I believe Google paid Apple for use of their maps, not the other way. More importantly, it was Google that denied to give Apple turn-by-turn navigation, rather than Apple blocking Google. This is not an anti-Apple policy. It's Google's standard policy not to allow licensees of its mapping API to use their data for real-time navigation guidance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddawson100
To be fair, they've built a world-wide map from scratch. Few companies would have the audaciousness, skill and money to do this. The maps team has done a fantastic job with most of this. Flyover is really fantastic and presents another approach beyond street-view from Google. There are some serious glaring mistakes that will be an Achilles heel for some time to come but Version 1 is more than usable for most of us, I assume. It's great in my little part of the world.
The world is large and mapping it is indeed tough. But Apple didn't do this from scratch. They purchased a number of companies and are licensing data from other companies. This is not to slight what Apple has accomplished. Just getting the facts straight ...
I seriously doubt that mapping software is the determining factor for potential iPhone buyers. These types of adverts are not going to dissuade anyone from buying one.
Seriously, if the shoe were on the other foot and Google or Samsung or whomever released a mapping product with this many problems, errors, and incorrect information would the response this board be "Give them time"? Especially if the company was boasting that their product was superior?
The large readable turn by turn instructions when following a route are really well thought out and better than the thin ribbon of instructions of Google maps for those of us getting a partner to navigate from the passenger seat. I've not come across the inaccuracies myself yet and it must be annoying, but I've had some problems with Google maps as well.
What I don't understand is what kind of idiot comes up with sad advertising like this. I don't like the Apple maps either, they're not terrible but a definite step back from the Google maps, but seeing crap advertising like this really doesn't make Motorola look anything better to me, in fact, quite the contrary. Apparently all Motorola can think of to promote their own products is a better maps application, a maps application I can still use through maps.google.com, and which will probably be available for iOS within a few weeks.
I can understand it's getting harder and harder to sell shovelware phones now that the iPhone has the fastest SoC, the best screen, the best build quality, the fastest network technology, the best batterly life and the largest selection of applications with the highest average quality. But even despite this, I personally wouldn't ever sink as low as advertising my products by pointing out the flaws in competing devices. Be original, think of some way to make your own product look better than it actually is, whatever. Something about the phone I want to buy, not something about the phone I don't want to buy. I always thought rule #1 in advertising was to not mention your competition.
Then again, Motorola must have the worst advertising agency in history anyway, I'd even go as far as saying their terrible marketing strategy is one of the main reasons they failed so hard. Checklists of specs and features, robots, sci-fi nerd stuff, chicks in leather, and phones that look like stealth planes, with red glowing eyes on the default theme. Yup, sounds like a great audience they are targetting there.
Has anyone looked in the Legal Notices section of the Settings>General>About to see where they are getting their map and turn-by-turn direction data from? TomTom, Waze, Postal databases, and other third parties. So, in addition to have having their own data, they are licensing third party data from reputable sources.
Have you even tried the maps? It's good they dropped them, more independence, and free from the google ecosystem that I once had a hand in helping design. Google maps wasn't built over night, and I've contributed 2 years of my life helping improve google maps..
Whether or not apple "dropped the ball" is completely opinionated as its worked absolutely steller for me with no hiccups or complaints.
No, Google maps wasn't built overnight. Neither was the iPhone. Do you really think if someone (say Motorola) brought out a phone that was only as good as the first iPhone, people on this board would excuse it with, "well the iPhone wasn't built overnight, it will get better"?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he's right. Apple did drop the ball with Maps in iOS 6. I think so. Loren Bricther thinks so. A lot of people think so. Apple is capable of making mistakes, you know. They should have worked on Maps for another year and added it to iOS 7 instead. And they should have also worked out a deal with big G to licence Street View from them for at least another few years.
This is one of the best posts I've seen about this. It amazes me on this board that only two extreme positions are possible. Either you love everything Apple do unconditionally and exclusively, or you are a "troll" or a "hater".
I'm a huge fan of Apple stuff. Indeed I'm a big enough fan of iPhone and iOS6 as a whole that the new Maps isn't going to make me even consider changing, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that the Maps application is far from being ready for primetime.
They could have at least enabled the sattelite version... but yes. Maps does need work. I haven't had trouble with it though over the number of months I've used it with access to iOS 6 beta.
Motorola should maybe spend time fixing the GPS issues in there phones instead of bashing Apple.
Apple had GPS issues of their own on the 4S. Most of the complaints about poor battery life stemmed from defective GPSes. A friend of mine got one of the affected phones, and her battery problems disappeared as soon as I told her to shut down Location Services (also told her to have the phone replaced, but she didn't appear to care enough). Not saying the problem is the same here, but your personal experience doesn't mean anything.
You dont see Apple advertising just another box of crap from (fill in an Andriod using company name)!
Apperantly noboby but Apple has the nerve to stand on thier own merrits when advertising. Very Child-ish.
Have you even tried the maps? It's good they dropped them, more independence, and free from the google ecosystem that I once had a hand in helping design. Google maps wasn't built over night, and I've contributed 2 years of my life helping improve google maps..
I have, and to me they suck as they can't even find mine or any of the neighboring streets here, it's even worse than finding them elsewhere, which would be acceptable because these streets are all named after cities in other countries, and without being able to perform reliable searches the app is pretty much useless, because search for addresses is what I use it mostly for. The fact that these streets are all charted on the map and this issue has existed since day 1 in the beta makes the situation even worse as it's not just the data that's crap but the software as well. Lastly the software is noticeably slower and power hungrier than the old maps, and despite the move to vectorial data (which was supposed to reduce the amount of data one needs to load from the Internet), it's actually loading slower than Google Maps ever did and rendering at a much lower frame rate.
Apple ditching Google may be good for them, but I am not them and I don't work for them, so it's not good for me and it actually degrades the quality of their service. Like the first poster mentioned, Apple is putting their politics ahead of their customers and deserve the crap they're getting over this.
Folks forget that. Google bought the work of another company that was already like 2 years into the game and has had another 5-7 years to get where they are now.
Folks forget that Apple bought several mapping companies and is licensing data from a lot of third party providers. The current solution doesn't differ much from what they got from Google, but the user experience does.
Bold statements for someone that has 3% smartphone share.
And look where Apple is now!
See what happens in just ten years? The style of advertising is just like what Apple would have done back then.
Except, you know, they wouldn't have shown their competitor's product.
Originally Posted by allmypeople
Apple's grudge against Google > Apple's users
Please don't quote CultOfMac and expect to be taken seriously in any regard on both the Internet and in real life. They're completely insane (and mostly anti-Apple) over there.
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } I've had zero problems with the usually problematic Philadelphia area. Navigon and Google Maps often messed up locations or tried to send me down closed or non-existent streets. This morning I went to get a blood sample taken. Google Maps put me on the wrong side of the street, half a mile away. Apple's Maps (what are we calling them anyway?) took me straight to the medical center's front door.
How hard is it to find a bug?
Visually and functionally, iOS 6's Maps have been a pleasure.
Apple had GPS issues of their own on the 4S. Most of the complaints about poor battery life stemmed from defective GPSes. A friend of mine got one of the affected phones, and her battery problems disappeared as soon as I told her to shut down Location Services (also told her to have the phone replaced, but she didn't appear to care enough). Not saying the problem is the same here, but your personal experience doesn't mean anything.
I noticed yesterday that Location Services seems obsessed with constantly checking where you are. I used Passbook for the first time (to get into the Giants game in San Francisco) and it worked really well. When we pulled into the parking lot by the stadium, I noticed that there was a banner on the lock screen saying I was near to AT&T Park, so the tickets were easy to get to. Getting into the ground was a breeze, and Passbook worked exactly as advertised. I was very impressed.
What I was not so impressed with was that during the game (and indeed until I deleted the now used tickets from Passbook), the phone continued to display the banner saying I was close to AT&T Park (obviously, I was sat in there), and the location marker at the top was constantly on. The battery was going down at a hell of a pace as well. Now I don't know if the location services marker at the top being on means the phone is constantly checking GPS for where I am, but given what the battery was doing, I assume it does. That to me just seemed like a bad design.
I wonder what all the complaining Map companies looked like days after they came out. I still find 5 mile errors in Google Maps and let them know so they can make the maps better. Suspect Motorola expects the same courtesy.
The nice thing about starting anew is that Apple is not tied to years of code that hinder improvements.
And there are ways to access Google Maps when Apple's is not quite right.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by mac_dog
hey ai. why not stick to one layout? i prefer the old one. the new one sucks.
I agree. The new AI design is a mess.
That's pretty remarkable.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddawson100
Or economics. I wonder how much Apple has had to pay Google for these last five years of lookups. It's interesting to me that they never tried to allow turn-by-turn from Google. I assume this is a decision made years ago and someone had to make the call to dump Google Maps and go with this built-in approach. Google has had a serious head start but at some point Apple had to introduce this. It may have been messy to do this later. I can't imagine this will be "fixed", whatever that means, for some time to come.
To be fair, they've built a world-wide map from scratch. Few companies would have the audaciousness, skill and money to do this. The maps team has done a fantastic job with most of this. Flyover is really fantastic and presents another approach beyond street-view from Google. There are some serious glaring mistakes that will be an Achilles heel for some time to come but Version 1 is more than usable for most of us, I assume. It's great in my little part of the world.
apple tried to get turn by turn from google in 2009 but google wouldn't agree, hence apple making it's own version. With the recent price hike, and 50% of google maps customers being iOS users, your economics makes lots of sense - source
apple must have know their licence was running out tho, ? did they no anticipate the price hike and short contract being refused.?
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddawson100
Or economics. I wonder how much Apple has had to pay Google for these last five years of lookups. It's interesting to me that they never tried to allow turn-by-turn from Google.
I believe Google paid Apple for use of their maps, not the other way. More importantly, it was Google that denied to give Apple turn-by-turn navigation, rather than Apple blocking Google. This is not an anti-Apple policy. It's Google's standard policy not to allow licensees of its mapping API to use their data for real-time navigation guidance.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ddawson100
To be fair, they've built a world-wide map from scratch. Few companies would have the audaciousness, skill and money to do this. The maps team has done a fantastic job with most of this. Flyover is really fantastic and presents another approach beyond street-view from Google. There are some serious glaring mistakes that will be an Achilles heel for some time to come but Version 1 is more than usable for most of us, I assume. It's great in my little part of the world.
The world is large and mapping it is indeed tough. But Apple didn't do this from scratch. They purchased a number of companies and are licensing data from other companies. This is not to slight what Apple has accomplished. Just getting the facts straight ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Harbinger
More importantly, it was Google that denied to give Apple turn-by-turn navigation, rather than Apple blocking Google.
Really? How do you know that? Is it the unidentified "people on both sides said so" from the WSJ?
Seriously, if the shoe were on the other foot and Google or Samsung or whomever released a mapping product with this many problems, errors, and incorrect information would the response this board be "Give them time"? Especially if the company was boasting that their product was superior?
I think not.
There are a large number of other mapping apps (some even use google data) including free ones, why bother to jailbreak when you have so much choice ?
What I don't understand is what kind of idiot comes up with sad advertising like this. I don't like the Apple maps either, they're not terrible but a definite step back from the Google maps, but seeing crap advertising like this really doesn't make Motorola look anything better to me, in fact, quite the contrary. Apparently all Motorola can think of to promote their own products is a better maps application, a maps application I can still use through maps.google.com, and which will probably be available for iOS within a few weeks.
I can understand it's getting harder and harder to sell shovelware phones now that the iPhone has the fastest SoC, the best screen, the best build quality, the fastest network technology, the best batterly life and the largest selection of applications with the highest average quality. But even despite this, I personally wouldn't ever sink as low as advertising my products by pointing out the flaws in competing devices. Be original, think of some way to make your own product look better than it actually is, whatever. Something about the phone I want to buy, not something about the phone I don't want to buy. I always thought rule #1 in advertising was to not mention your competition.
Then again, Motorola must have the worst advertising agency in history anyway, I'd even go as far as saying their terrible marketing strategy is one of the main reasons they failed so hard. Checklists of specs and features, robots, sci-fi nerd stuff, chicks in leather, and phones that look like stealth planes, with red glowing eyes on the default theme. Yup, sounds like a great audience they are targetting there.
Has anyone looked in the Legal Notices section of the Settings>General>About to see where they are getting their map and turn-by-turn direction data from? TomTom, Waze, Postal databases, and other third parties. So, in addition to have having their own data, they are licensing third party data from reputable sources.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Flash_beezy
Why are you still posting this stupid shit?
Have you even tried the maps? It's good they dropped them, more independence, and free from the google ecosystem that I once had a hand in helping design. Google maps wasn't built over night, and I've contributed 2 years of my life helping improve google maps..
Whether or not apple "dropped the ball" is completely opinionated as its worked absolutely steller for me with no hiccups or complaints.
No, Google maps wasn't built overnight. Neither was the iPhone. Do you really think if someone (say Motorola) brought out a phone that was only as good as the first iPhone, people on this board would excuse it with, "well the iPhone wasn't built overnight, it will get better"?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he's right. Apple did drop the ball with Maps in iOS 6. I think so. Loren Bricther thinks so. A lot of people think so. Apple is capable of making mistakes, you know. They should have worked on Maps for another year and added it to iOS 7 instead. And they should have also worked out a deal with big G to licence Street View from them for at least another few years.
This is one of the best posts I've seen about this. It amazes me on this board that only two extreme positions are possible. Either you love everything Apple do unconditionally and exclusively, or you are a "troll" or a "hater".
I'm a huge fan of Apple stuff. Indeed I'm a big enough fan of iPhone and iOS6 as a whole that the new Maps isn't going to make me even consider changing, but that doesn't mean I can't acknowledge that the Maps application is far from being ready for primetime.
Apple had GPS issues of their own on the 4S. Most of the complaints about poor battery life stemmed from defective GPSes. A friend of mine got one of the affected phones, and her battery problems disappeared as soon as I told her to shut down Location Services (also told her to have the phone replaced, but she didn't appear to care enough). Not saying the problem is the same here, but your personal experience doesn't mean anything.
"Hi, I'm a Mac! And I'm a PC..."
I have, and to me they suck as they can't even find mine or any of the neighboring streets here, it's even worse than finding them elsewhere, which would be acceptable because these streets are all named after cities in other countries, and without being able to perform reliable searches the app is pretty much useless, because search for addresses is what I use it mostly for. The fact that these streets are all charted on the map and this issue has existed since day 1 in the beta makes the situation even worse as it's not just the data that's crap but the software as well. Lastly the software is noticeably slower and power hungrier than the old maps, and despite the move to vectorial data (which was supposed to reduce the amount of data one needs to load from the Internet), it's actually loading slower than Google Maps ever did and rendering at a much lower frame rate.
Apple ditching Google may be good for them, but I am not them and I don't work for them, so it's not good for me and it actually degrades the quality of their service. Like the first poster mentioned, Apple is putting their politics ahead of their customers and deserve the crap they're getting over this.
I'm sure you can report cases where Google Maps can't even find stuff that's perfectly charted on the map, then.
Folks forget that Apple bought several mapping companies and is licensing data from a lot of third party providers. The current solution doesn't differ much from what they got from Google, but the user experience does.
Originally Posted by Red Oak
Bold statements for someone that has 3% smartphone share.
And look where Apple is now!
See what happens in just ten years? The style of advertising is just like what Apple would have done back then.
Except, you know, they wouldn't have shown their competitor's product.
Originally Posted by allmypeople
Apple's grudge against Google > Apple's users
Please don't quote CultOfMac and expect to be taken seriously in any regard on both the Internet and in real life. They're completely insane (and mostly anti-Apple) over there.
2. I've never used Android, but Maps looks good in this 1'35'' [URL=
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
I've had zero problems with the usually problematic Philadelphia area. Navigon and Google Maps often messed up locations or tried to send me down closed or non-existent streets. This morning I went to get a blood sample taken. Google Maps put me on the wrong side of the street, half a mile away. Apple's Maps (what are we calling them anyway?) took me straight to the medical center's front door.
How hard is it to find a bug?
Visually and functionally, iOS 6's Maps have been a pleasure.
Oh, and Motorola = Google.
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vaelian
Apple had GPS issues of their own on the 4S. Most of the complaints about poor battery life stemmed from defective GPSes. A friend of mine got one of the affected phones, and her battery problems disappeared as soon as I told her to shut down Location Services (also told her to have the phone replaced, but she didn't appear to care enough). Not saying the problem is the same here, but your personal experience doesn't mean anything.
I noticed yesterday that Location Services seems obsessed with constantly checking where you are. I used Passbook for the first time (to get into the Giants game in San Francisco) and it worked really well. When we pulled into the parking lot by the stadium, I noticed that there was a banner on the lock screen saying I was near to AT&T Park, so the tickets were easy to get to. Getting into the ground was a breeze, and Passbook worked exactly as advertised. I was very impressed.
What I was not so impressed with was that during the game (and indeed until I deleted the now used tickets from Passbook), the phone continued to display the banner saying I was close to AT&T Park (obviously, I was sat in there), and the location marker at the top was constantly on. The battery was going down at a hell of a pace as well. Now I don't know if the location services marker at the top being on means the phone is constantly checking GPS for where I am, but given what the battery was doing, I assume it does. That to me just seemed like a bad design.
The nice thing about starting anew is that Apple is not tied to years of code that hinder improvements.
And there are ways to access Google Maps when Apple's is not quite right.