I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers.
Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US.
If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
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I think Amazon one-upped Apple on the maps front by licensing Navteq's maps (now owned by Nokia) for the Kindle tablets and wrapping a nice API around them for developers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/amazon_google_map_bm...
Navteq's maps are way better than TomTom's. One of my friends had a TomTom GPS a few years ago and it was terrible, like once taking us around in circles for a restaurant and showing it was three miles away, when we could see it across the street a few hundred feet away. He had such bad experiences with it that he would borrow our Garmins and finally switched to Garmin a year ago. I just assumed that TomTom was Europe based so had much better coverage there and pretty horrible maps in the US.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/375415/how-satnav-maps-are-m...
If I were Google, I would release a very polished maps app for iOS for $10 with ads, but they might be just content with some people picking Android phones just because the builtin maps experience and turn by turn voice directions is really good.
My experience in the reverse and backs up your assumption: in the UK TomTom has MUCH better maps than my Garmin device.