Apple, Google: Battle of the Cloud Maps 179
Nerval's Lobster writes "Google has sent invitations for a June 6 event in which it will apparently unveil 'The Next Dimension of Google Maps.' Meanwhile, rumor suggests Apple is preparing its own mapping service for iOS devices. The escalating battle over maps demonstrates the importance of cloud apps to tech companies' larger strategies." I only wish my phone would hold by default the X-million data points that my outmoded (but cheap and functional) dedicated GPS device does, without quite so much cloud-centric bottlenecking, and leave all expensive data use for optional overlays and current conditions.
Google Maps Gripes (Score:3, Interesting)
I just wish that Google would learn some lessons about 2D cartography. Like how to mark toll roads and stuff.
It's kind of frustrating because Google maps is really good at local stuff (zoom in to see individual business names and stuff, and of course street view) but other services are a lot better once you're looking at a range beyond a few blocks.
Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not talking about the turn-by-turn directions, I'm talking about the maps. Quick, where are the toll roads [wisc.edu]? How 'bout now [wisc.edu]? Or now [wisc.edu]?
I guess if you just enter in a start and end into Google maps and blindly follow whatever comes out it works fine, but if you want to scan around for alternate routes (hint: Google doesn't pick the best route for going through Chicago from east-to-west or vice versa) or just want to look around at maps, that's not good enough.
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Not dozens of road types, hundreds of various symbols etc that you see in some road maps
And this is my problem with it; you say "the philosophy is simplicity and clarity", I say "the philosophy is have far less information" and then dispute the "clarity" part.
Here's another example; I'll just compare to Bing maps because I like them the best (in no small part because they seem to be the closest to printed maps). Compare this [google.com] to this [bing.com]. (Durrr, I can link the maps directly, I don't need to take a screenshot an
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So you route around tolls?
Interesting. I don't worry about it. One solitary trip down a tollroad isn't going to bankrupt me, and if I do it repeatedly (like a daily commute) then I learn to avoid that road. Of course oftentimes the tollroad is the cheapest route..... I recall a friend of mine was trying to avoid the Baltimore Tunnel Toll drove *all the way around* the city on 695 beltway.
He probably spent more on gas then if he'd just paid the $1 toll. --- As I became more familiar with the city, I
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I do look, though I'll admit that it usually doesn't pan out in terms of being worth it.
For instance, taking the Chicago case, if you're traveling west-to-east from Rockford (or, as is probably clear from the urls I linked, Madison) to points East, if I-88 wasn't a toll road it'd probably be worth it to use that route. It's a bit longer, but you'd save several dollars on tolls and it's a bit better driving than I-90 is.
Or once I asked for advice on how late it's reasonable to hit Chicago before afternoon ru
Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:5, Interesting)
In some cities the toll for tunnels is >$10, people do all sorts of weird things to avoid it.
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so the avoid toll roads option doesn't work for you?
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Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:4, Informative)
Caching the route does work. At least it does on every Android phone I've owned. When you drive through parts of the southwest United States, you often travel for hundreds of miles with no cell coverage at all. Google Maps keeps chugging along, as long as I don't end navigation on my current route.
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That's still retarded. It's like when you turn off the stereo it burns all your CDs.
Is there no way to permanently (at least until you make a positive decision to remove it) store the data locally?
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That's still retarded. It's like when you turn off the stereo it burns all your CDs.
I think Sony has something like that in the works right now....
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Sure.
But what's that got to do with Google making a retarded design decision? It's certainly not very relevant to those who don't have Nokia phones.
As it happens I have a Nokia E71 with Ovi maps. I don't find it particularly brilliant, though I suppose I can't complain given that it was free.
Still, I don't know why it took them a year to port it from the E72 which is basically the same phone. Trying to push people to upg
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Just because you don't understand it doesn't make it retarded.
It's always updated, you're download is in small pieces. Some GPS updates will take a GIg of downloads, and the auto ones can hit at anytime.
" I don't know why it took them a year to port it from the E72 "
because there developers also have other things to do?
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Map data is exceedingly expensive to license, particularly if it contains everything needed to do street routing as well. Map tiles themselves you could generate from TIGER/Line data for free if a company wanted to, but it's still a lot of processing, and TIGER isn't sufficiently detailed to use for routing, and the data is still somewhat out of date compared to the commercial vendors.
Buying the rights to serve it piecemeal like Google Maps does is far cheaper than buying the rights to redistribute the enti
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That's still retarded. It's like when you turn off the stereo it burns all your CDs.
Is there no way to permanently (at least until you make a positive decision to remove it) store the data locally?
Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage). Go into Settings, then Labs, then enable the pre-cache feature. Then long-tap on the centerpoint of the area you want to pre-cache. Tap the bubble that pops up, and then tap "pre-cache" at the bottom of the dialog. It'll take a minute to download that square, but then you'll have cached map data (map only; no satellite, etc.)
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Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage).
and for a maximum of 30 days, at which point anything you've cached silently expires and deletes itself (well, maps deletes it.)
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Not along a route, but you can cache any number of 10 mile-side squares (up to storage limits -- and most phones have a lot of storage).
and for a maximum of 30 days, at which point anything you've cached silently expires and deletes itself (well, maps deletes it.)
Interesting. I discovered this feature less than 30 days ago, so I haven't seen that yet.
Offline - Use Sygic (Score:2)
Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:4, Insightful)
You can already precache a 10km square area around any point (saved permanently) plus cache 150 Mb of rolling data. That's been good enough for me to travel everywhere I've wanted so far (including a five month backpacking trip last year).
Yes, it would be great to have continent maps available for download, but the current options are a lot better than nothing.
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While Google Maps can't do this, there are apps out there that DO allow you to do this (at least for iOS, I'm sure there would be on Android too). Two off the top of my head I can think of:
Expensive: The TomTom app (basically turns your phone into something almost identical to the actual stand-alone TomTom units, including the fact that the maps are stored locally)
Cheap: MotionXGPS: allows you to download and store locally mapping/sat data for any arbitrary area you want, sourced from either Bing, OpenStree
Re:Google Maps Gripes (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using OSMAnd since I got my current phone, and it's so much more useful than Google Maps that comparing them is a joke. The map data (from OSM) has been better in every city I've visited. For example, visiting a friend in Paris, OSM had his building numbered and marked the bank and bakery nearby so it was trivial to find even without GPS. Google Maps just about had the roads labelled. In Brussels, the roads have three names: the one in French, the one in Dutch, and the one on Google Maps. The OSM data had all three. Oh, and the hotel I was staying in was labelled on OSM, while Google Maps thought it was about 100m away from where it really was. Looking for a tango class in Swansea, the building was labelled in OSM, but Google Maps didn't even show the road that it was on. In Cambridge, all of the college and university buildings and cycle paths are labelled on OSM, Google Maps just about manages to label the big university sites and the roads.
OSMand lets you download vector data, so it works fine with no network connection. I've got about 1GB of map data on my phone currently, covering England, Wales, Belgium and the north of France. It can do route finding either online or on the phone. The latter uses quite a lot of memory for longer routes (it's still marked as an experimental feature), but aside from that works very well. Getting to know my way around Cambridge was made very easy by having a navigation aid that understood all of the cycle routes.
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I think the difference here is national. Google is all up in your streetz mapping your wifiz and knows what is where to a high level of detail... in the USA. In various European countries which value public privacy more than we do, the data is going to be inferior.
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I've been using it since its release, and I never realized that.
I wonder is it's on the tablet?
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And identify toll bridges and tunnels, which it apparently doesn't even recognize as toll routes currently.
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Avoid toll roads option.
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It doesn't recognize (most?) toll bridges/tunnels as toll roads. It will happily take you across toll bridges/tunnels without telling you there are tolls involved, even if you use the "avoid toll roads" option.
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That must be a localized issue, it's known about every toll bridge/tunnel I've been across, on the east and west coasts and lots of different states and cities in between. It can even get you from mainland New York to Long Island and back without paying the ridiculous NYC bridge tolls (the least-convenient bridges don't have a toll but even if you look it up ahead of time it can be difficult to figure out where to go).
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Well, specifically, it took me across the GW Bridge when I told it to avoid tolls, and I was not happy to find out it's a $12 toll. It also tried to take me across the Tappan Zee bridge without indicating it's a toll.
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you mean google maps isn't even good for driving? i'm in nyc, and only the major streets are labeled unless you zoom in to near-uselessness. even if the gps can't figure out that i'm moving at 2mph, you'd think they'd have and default to a pedestrian-mode in manhattan.
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Yeah, I wonder how the GPS reception is in downtown NYC.
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wish i could tell you, but i have nothing to compare it to. in my experience, it's between one and six blocks off, with the median at two.
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Yyeah, GPS 'reception' is awful in any high-rise city. (I say 'reception', because the reception itself in terms of signal strength is usually fine - the issue is rather that the signal is getting bounced off buildings and thus longer to get to you, which obviously means your position calculated from those signals will be off).
Phone or stand-alone GPS doesn't seem to matter that much ... I get the same problems on my iPhone as I do with my regular car Garmin GPS when I drive into central Sydney. You basical
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Yes, sort of.
Last time I was in Chicago, my Droid (which did do an excellent job of triangulating my location, and was accurate within a couple dozen feet even inside of a hotel as long as there was sufficient visible WiFi) failed miserably at getting me back to Ohio.
But it kept insisting I turn right from Lakeshore Drive where turning right was impossible due to physical barriers, while pretending to know where I was: It thought I was on a parallel road just to the south, and I wasn't.
Meanwhile, my cheap
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It's always seemed to work fine for me in NYC, either driving or as a pedestrian, with my Nexus One. But you do need to have more situational awareness there than you do in more spread-out places, though of course that applies no matter how you're navigating there. You can't rely on following voice instructions like you (usually) can elsewhere because sometimes the signals bouncing off the buildings will confuse it - but you can glance at what street it wants you to turn on next and look for it yourself, an
I have a feeling (Score:4, Interesting)
...it will be a battle in name only.
apple are highly unlikely to put out an API for other to use as they wish like Google did.
While GMaps might take a back-seat on iOS, it will still be by far the most dominant system out there unless Apple allow use outside of the iOSphere.
At the end of the day if it's only available on iOS and Mac then it's essentially on a minority of devices on what is now a minority platform.
Still, it no doubt will have Google scrambling to bring us more cool stuff, so it's win-win all round.
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At the end of the day if it's only available on iOS and Mac then it's essentially on a minority of devices on what is now a minority platform.
Uh, you're kidding [businessinsider.com], right? Apple's inventory stock has been compared to restaurants, that must get rid of it because it's perishable. It's ridiculous how competitive Apple is right now against ALL of the Android phone manufacturers. I'm not sure their growth rate will last, but you're just silly to claim the iOS platform is merely a "minority platform." It's not like 2-5% marketshare, like the Mac used to be... they're neck and neck against EVERY OTHER phone manufacturer put together. Mac's marketshare is g
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An advantage in what way? What is it that the companies providing mapping want? Maps is not a symmetrical platform war.
Google uses mapping to advertise. The more users they have on any platform the better for them.
Apple just wants to sell more hardware. Maps is a good old fashioned feature. They will have a motivation to deny their maps to people without Apple hardware. Apple do have an advertising platform (iAd), but it's very much a sideline compared with the main business of selling hardware. And it's Ap
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Apple's doing it's own maps because they can't rely any longer on the map service being supplied by one of their biggest competitors. They have no motivation to have the most users for them, other than because those people have bought Apple devices.
Nicely said. This is precisely the reason. Google is intentionally dropping the ball, saving the best features for Android... and now they have competition on iOS, they're stepping up their game. Competition is a good thing.
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Apple having their own mapping system means NO restrictions on developers, ...
Don't you mean ONLY the restrictions that Apple requires?
I don't develop for IOS but I thought there were considerable restrictions governing how their other APIs are used.
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Google Map is not only usable from Android devices. It is usable from any desktop out there
And Apple can not deliver a desktop map because....
I understand what you mean about scope of use, but in the end it doesn't matter what the scope is, if enough care is put into the mapping solution. Even if they don't deliver a desktop version of the mapping service.
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And Apple can not deliver a desktop map because....
No reason at all they won't have it on Macs. It's a pretty likely feature for Mountain Lion. But they have no motivation whatsoever to let non-Apple users have access to them.
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I spend far more time planning routes and finding places in my desktop than I do in my mobile phone
Why? That indicates to me you have a crap mobile phone navigation system. With my dedicated Garmin sat-nav I've never felt the desire to do any pre-planning on a PC. I have a sat-nav to do navigation more efficiently, not to make extra tasks before I travel.
On Mac years before it was on Windows (Score:2)
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Yep, Exactly what I meant.
Add desktop to the mix as an aggregate total and Apple universe is by far a minority platform.
I would hazard a guess that the displaying of Google maps on other websites etc on the desktop/web platform is several magnitudes more than on mobile apps.
I run a small site that serves up about 10000 map views a day, there's literally millions of sites doing the same.
If Apple decide not to chase this non-mobile stuff then they are really only playing in their own backyard and all this med
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Apple have no motivation to give their maps to anyone who's not on an Apple device. There will be no battle between Apple and Google for total user count. It's irrelevant to Apple. All thats relevant is their hardware sales. And to a much lesser extent App Store app sales.
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Apple can't compete with that with a service restricted only to their OS as it is usually its practice when developing anything.
Apple have no motivation to compete on map numbers per se. Maps for them is just a feature to sell hardware. They will of course give iOS developers an API. And they will of course not allow their maps to be used in any way on anything other than an Apple device. Overall map usage numbers are irrelevant. Only Apple hardware and App Store app sales matter to them.
Nokia (Score:5, Informative)
I only wish my phone would hold by default the X-million data points that my outmoded (but cheap and functional) dedicated GPS device does, without quite so much cloud-centric bottlenecking, and leave all expensive data use for optional overlays and current conditions.
You mean like any number of Nokia phones that support the free OVI Maps application?
Re:Nokia (Score:5, Informative)
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Navigon is really not very cheap (considering the price of the alternatives, $0) and they don't offer lifetime maps. For the price of Navigon and a couple of years of maps you could buy a refurb'd Garmin GPS device. Indeed, I did.
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At least in TomTom there's no easy way to actually use the map the way you'd use Google maps (enter point of interest, I.e stadium, find it; enter parking, find parking near stadium). That is mostly how I use the phone maps and TomTom requires dozens more steps to get something similar done and the point of interests list is also frequently out of date.
Not all functionality has to be built-in (Score:4, Informative)
I only wish my phone would hold by default the X-million data points that my outmoded (but cheap and functional) dedicated GPS device does, without quite so much cloud-centric bottlenecking, and leave all expensive data use for optional overlays and current conditions.
There is an app for that, seriously there are multiple apps for that. Decent maps built-in. More detailed ones, including topo, available via free download.
Not all functionality has to come from Apple, or whoever is doing the OS and built-in apps, some things can be left to third parties.
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There is an app for that, seriously there are multiple apps for that.
Heck, even Google Maps on Android will cache map data (no pictures or traffic). Enable the option in Labs, go back to the area you want to cache and long-press in the middle, then click the option to cache it, and you'll get a 10 mile square around that spot. Yes, you can do multiple squares, too: I did 6 somewhat overlapping squares tonight, and it says they take up 21MB.
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60 square miles = 21 MB
1 GB / 21 MB = 48.76
2,925.6 square miles = 1 GB on Android
I hope the other Apps the GP referred to aren't as wasteful with storage space.
For references: 3,794,083 square miles (the USA w/water) ~= 1GB on my GPS
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It's a 10mile 'radius' square. So each square is 20x20 = 400 square miles. 6 of them makes 2,400sqm. Now he said that they overlapped a bit, but then the 21MB includes other cached maps as well, not just the permanent ones, so lets call it even.
3,794,083/2,400 = 1,581, so 33GB.
Then take into account, that GP most likely saved map data in a city (higher density), which the vast majority of the USA is not, and it's likely comparable.
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I hope the other Apps the GP referred to aren't as wasteful with storage space.
The one I use allows you to choose the detail level on the downloaded maps.
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I live in an island which is 5km wide and 40km long. Cities and everything else is organized across the 40*1 km range. So the whole cache thing is useless for me.
Why is that? You cache two 10-mile (24 km) squares and you have your whole island cached. Plus a great deal of water, but ignore that.
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Except that your smartphone with an always-on GPS-tracking app, recording a data point every 5 feet, will last at most 2 hours on a full battery.
My Garmin handheld doing just that, with a better precision, will last 15 hours on a couple of AA batteries. And when they're over, I can just swap another pair in. And I can use it under the rain. With the gloves on.
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I have a couple old Garmin GPS 12 devices for when I need a GPS for hiking etc. But any typical Garmin GPS device that the typical person will own today is a PDA running an app and getting 2-3 hours of battery life. (I have one of those too, since it serves a different need.)
Have some analog skills, don't rely on batteries (Score:2)
Except that your smartphone with an always-on GPS-tracking app, recording a data point every 5 feet, will last at most 2 hours on a full battery.
Actually I've experimented with my iPhone and it lasted about 5 hours while hiking. The app is targeting outdoor activities and may not sample as frequently as you suggest. Perhaps you are referring to an app that is oriented towards those driving around in a car.
My Garmin handheld doing just that, with a better precision, will last 15 hours on a couple of AA batteries. And when they're over, I can just swap another pair in. And I can use it under the rain. With the gloves on.
I've considered getting a Garmin on many occasions, especially when on sale at REI. However I generally navigate with paper (waterproof) topo map and mechanical compass. The iPhone is generally powered off and only turned on to take photos. And as
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I only wish my phone would hold by default the X-million data points that my outmoded (but cheap and functional) dedicated GPS device does, without quite so much cloud-centric bottlenecking, and leave all expensive data use for optional overlays and current conditions.
What's wrong with his phone? Does he have an iPhone?
My Android phone allows me to cache as much google maps tiles as I want for off-line navigation. It's just one of the google labs option that needs to be enabled from the google maps application, that's all. As to the data points themselves, I save every address I run across into my address book, that way it comes up automatically as an auto-complete item when I enter a destination.
But even then, I am glad I'm no longer using my standalone gps unit for its
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Are you sure you can cache as many tiles as you want? I just tried and reached a limit of 10.
Caching (Score:4, Interesting)
I only wish my phone would hold by default the X-million data points that my outmoded (but cheap and functional) dedicated GPS device does, without quite so much cloud-centric bottlenecking, and leave all expensive data use for optional overlays and current conditions.
No shit dude. I have a fucking 32GB phone of which I'm using about 3GB. The thing I use more than anything is Google Maps. If it's downloaded something, why does it ever delete it? I can cache apparently unlimited 10 mile squares (100 square miles?), but I can't say "Just fucking download the entire state of Iowa" (because, really, who would want to?).
But I suppose they're getting there. Slowly.
Don't you get it? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason they don't make it easy to download an entire map has nothing to do with storage or bandwidth. It has to do with *tracking*.
Location Based Services -- Since we know where you are, we can suggest you turn right and have a pizza at the restaurant that pays us to steer customers their way. etc... etc... etc...
Google has a talent for fooling people into thinking that they are offering all these great FREE services out of the goodness of their corporate heart. On the contrary, those services are very profitable, and the way they accomplish all that money making is by knowing a WHOLE HELL OF A LOT about YOU.
Anyway, it's up to you folks. But don't bitch about not getting the whole free map thing - now that you understand why it is not in Google's or Apple's or Microsoft's (or fill-in-the-blank-megacorp-giving-away-services) to provide them.
That's my $37.00 worth (I'm old and that's about what 2 cents used to be worth when I was a wee one)
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That and the whole Don't Copy That Floppy(tm) thing. Someone with a big chunk of Google Maps=another website with a big chunk of Google Maps and its associated third-party imagery=(mad Google lawyers)+(higher license fees for Google to procure the imagery)=(mad Google lawyers)+(less Google shareholders thanks to lower "Profit!").
Or something like that.
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Does Google Maps actually push adverts through the turn-by-turn navigation in the U.S. now, or did you just confuse Google with some movie you saw? So far, it seems Google's success as an advertising business comes from being less obnoxious than the others. Pushing somewhat relevant ads might contribute to that.
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You could get one of those appalling non-smartphones with that terrible OS Symbian on it and use their downloadable maps which offer both caching and the ability to pre-download maps for any country and have offered this for years.
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Or go the cheaper option and install one of a million other apps that do the same thing?
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You really get unlimited cached tiles? Have you tried going past 10? Wonder why I have a limit of 10...
Want offline maps? (Score:3)
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The underlying map data is key (Score:3)
Regardless of any really cool/geeky features, the underlying map data can make or break the app. Google doesn't have a problem because, well, they're using the google maps data, which is pretty decent.
On the other hand, Apple has a challenge: what maps data source do they use? Since Apple seems to be trying to avoid Google, I'm assuming that the google maps data is out. I really hope that Apple goes with a major commercial maps data source, and not openstreetmap. If Apple uses openstreetmap, I think Apple's map app is doomed, as I don't think any amount of lipstick is going to make openstreetmap look good.
(OK, don't get me wrong -- I like openstreetmap, and I like the idea of it. However, it's missing 10+-year-old roads in my area. For the people who just started frothing at the mouth and want to scream at me to say that I can edit the maps, you're missing the point. The point is not that I can go in and fix the map data. The point is that, statistically speaking, if some of the map data is inaccurate in my area, it's likely inaccurate in many other places, and this raises severe reliability/trustability issues with me. Like it or not, the google maps data is a lot more accurate than openstreetmap, and thus is a lot more trustable.)
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"Like it or not, the google maps data is a lot more accurate than openstreetmap, and thus is a lot more trustable."
You have any data to backup your claim? And no, it's not "if there's lack of data in our neibourhood, then it must be rest of the world". Because when I see lack of data, I just map them and they are in database in 3 minutes after I have done survey, put data into system and have verified their statuses, routing, etc. Currently it is much better than Google Maps ever was in my region.
OpenStreet
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I'm guessing from your spelling choices that you're in the UK?
Based on your comment and various others, it appears to me that Google Maps data in the US is very good, which has led to relatively little interest in OSM, which has led to OSM data not being so great. In some other industrialized countries the reverse has been true. Since Google isn't very good, there's greater interest in OSM, which leads to OSM data being very good.
Does that agree with your experience?
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It easily could be that way, yes.
Of course OSM data is not perfect, and it's even less perfect in regions when there are already some solid maps. However, this slowly, but surery changes. In my region it's easily best digital map available. It could be differently in other places.
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That certainly used to be true -- there used to be appropriate copyright notices at the bottom of the map. However, if you look at google maps now, the only copyright there is Google's. That implies that Google owns the map data that it uses.
I'd love to be wrong, though. :)
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It depends. It's hard to look at imagery map tiles without seeing four different copyrights from private and government agencies. For map data, just looking through Los Angeles, sometimes the map data is (c) Google, sometimes it's (c) City of Pasadena, sometimes it's (c) Cybercity. Also when you route directions more people seem to be involved.
You can see in Google's licensing terms [google.com] an enumeration of where they get their mapping data; a lot of this can be delivered under Google's copyright if their work,
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Um, Nokia makes and owns all their maps. They bought Navteq years ago. Microsoft and Yahoo use Nokia maps as their backend.
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Actually, Google does generate a lot of its own map data. Google buys whatever data they can, but in many areas have paid to create it themselves where the available data wasn't of sufficiently high quality. For city areas, where Google wants to provide complete coverage of 3D building models, Google bought Sketchup and then incented people to create models in various ways, including just paying them. Now Google is shifting to automated means of generating 3D models from other data (I'm not sure how much
fix the accuracy first (Score:3, Interesting)
Map pricing (Score:2)
In Australia, a set of new maps for most consumer GPS units is more than the cost of a (cheap) new unit. If you have a dash-mounted system, forget it.
I don't know if that's a global issue or the 'Australia tax', but I'll support any system which is up to date and doesn't cost me a stupid amount of money to remain current.
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Huh? This varies by brand/model. Most TomTom units have free map updates. Garmin ones are $99, though you can buy a lifetime map updates package for not much more than this. Etc.
Also, at least for Garmin (which I am most familiar with), map updates are managed through their website and appear to cost the same for users worldwide, so no issue of 'Australia tax' there.
What expensive data use? (Score:3)
As someone who almost daily uses Google Navigation on my phone and who has a 200MB data plan ... what expensive data use are we talking about?
Also is it really necessary for someone to publish their opinion in the Slashdot summary after quoting and linking to a Slashdot opinion piece?
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As someone who almost daily uses Google Navigation on my phone and who has a 200MB data plan ... what expensive data use are we talking about?
In Europe, data plans are ridiculously expensive when crossing borders. You can be forced to pay in the range of $20 per MB data.
Roaming across borders is a common scenario when on holiday and it's also when you're away from home you have the greatest need for a GPS.
IN short, off-line caching of maps is critical for Europe.
ps. I love waze but can't use it when Roami
Offline POI (Score:5, Interesting)
"Cloud" apps again? (Score:3)
"The escalating battle over maps demonstrates the importance of cloud apps to tech companies' larger strategies."
Stupid me, for a moment I thought the battle demonstrates the importance of location-sensitive map applications and not of "cloud" apps in general. There is a technical reason for map applications to be client/server-based, since world-wide high-resolution map data is many terrabytes in size. There is no sound technical reason for server-side data storage in the vast majority of other "cloud" apps, except for the purpose of collecting user-date, of course.
Two words: Scenic Map (Score:2)
Check out Scenic Map from GrangerFX. Totally offline 2D/3D maps. http://scenicmap.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
I use it for search & rescue where we're in the middle of stinking nowhere with no cellphone coverage.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
What the holy hell? Did 4chan just spring a leak?
I do't see Google and Apple being the only players (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe Google and Apple being the most visible players in the cloud competition, but I do not think they will be the only major players
Other firm that have already enter the fray, or will enter in a big way are firms that already have an online presence, such as Amazon or Facebook, or firms that have traditionally offer corporate services, such as IBM, or firms such as Microsoft; Major ISPs and Telcos may also want to branch out in this field
Even major datacenter operators may see cloud computing as an exten
Re:I do't see Google and Apple being the only play (Score:4, Funny)
[http://www.digitimes.com] [paywall, sorry]
Wait... People actually pay to read the BS Apple rumors that digitimes is constantly reporting?
Re: (Score:3)
And why we suddenly accidentally some verbs from our sentences?
I accidentally a Coke bottle, the economy, etc. (Score:2)