That's very interesting (and useful) information. It sounds like it's not "Popular Urban Locations" but instead, a "subset of popular urban location" - Perhaps I guess I need to be very specific and say in the Bay Area (Everywhere, all the way down to Gilroy).
Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.
Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6 Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5 Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No Internet connection required, here are your maps."
While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like "Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City), and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as a generic mapping application needs to be for my use in the peninsula area.
I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their mapping application.
It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give directly.
Comments
That's very interesting (and useful) information. It sounds like it's not "Popular Urban Locations" but instead, a "subset of popular urban location" - Perhaps I guess I need to be very specific and say in the Bay Area (Everywhere, all the way down to Gilroy).
Your experience, though, explains why Tim Cook felt he needed to apologize.
Locally (Redwood City, Foster City, Mountain View) I prefer to use the IOS 6 Mapping application on my iPhone 5, than, rather than, side-by-side, the IOS 5 Mapping application on an iPhone 4S. Forgetting about Turn-by-Turn (which is the obvious and clear advantage of IOS 6 Mapping) - the super twitchy-fast vector Maps in IOS 6 Maps, not to mention their offline presence made all the difference. Particularly if you get into a sketchy cell area, where the old IOS 5 maps was basically "No Maps" - compared to the IOS 6 Maps which are "No Internet connection required, here are your maps."
While in Redwood City, I send all sorts of queries out to Siri like "Directions to Waterfront Pizza" (It picks the right one up in Foster City), and "Directions to 3463 Page Street" (It's intelligent enough to use the Page Street in Redwood City) - I use maps a lot, and haven't seen any regression beyond what I would see in google maps. IOS 6 maps is as close to flawless as a generic mapping application needs to be for my use in the peninsula area.
I wonder if Apple did something remarkably stupid, and only optimized the Bay Area? If so, then they deserve all the bad press they've received over their mapping application.
It might be interesting to have some third-party do a "Here are 1000 typical queries in 100 typical urban locations" and come back with a scorecard. Given that Apple is pulling a lot of data from TomTom for IOS 6 maps, I would be surprise to see their results much poorer than what TomTom would do give directly.