“MacRumors discovered that Apple quietly acquired mapping service Placebase back in July. Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman’s updated LinkedIn profile now lists him on the ‘Geo Team’ at Apple. So what’s Apple’s interest in a mapping company? The obvious guess would be as a replacement for the Google Maps application that is installed by default on all iPhones.”
For a NEWS site, the article’s title is a bit misleading as no one has made any statement and nothing has actually happened. If this was a rumors site then it wouldn’t have bugged me! As it’s not the title should say something like “Placebase CEO now with Apple” or “Apple working with Geo Team”.
I’m not sure I’m surprised by this move. While Google Maps is pretty good, I think it has spurned healthy competition for other mapping technologies, and they all tend to have the same basic interface these days.
Apple has always been big on the NIH concept. I’m guessing in this case the iPhone integration with the mapping tool could increase. Furthermore, they’ll no longer be “sharing” user-related information with Google, which I’m sure drives all companies competing with Google in some fashion absolutely nuts.
Although, it’s not Google’s fault. I think the GPS in the iPhone is just lousy sometimes. When you look at your location, there’s often a circle around it indicating the certainty of the position. Small circle, high certainty. I’ve had it give me a position where it says it’s certain that I knew to be miles and miles away from my true position. They also don’t do anything smart like figure out if you’re moving and at what velocity and try to use that to better predict your position.
Let’s not forget that Google Maps is very often completely wrong. When using a regular computer, I’ve switched back to using MapQuest. It’s been 5 years since MapQuest lead me astray. Google Maps did just last week. Interestingly, there was construction in my area on a major highway through the heart of the metro area, where quite a number of exit/entrance ramps were closed for a few months. MapQuest magically and automatically avoided those ramps. Google Maps blithely gave me impossible directions. (Of course, I’ve had it give me impossible directions when there WASN’T construction.) Now, it’s a hell of a lot to ask any mapping service to keep track of every construction project in the world. I’m just impressed that MapQuest did!
About the only thing you can do in a hurry on the iPhone is make a phone call. Even on 3G, the internet connection is dog slow. Blocked by a train, decided to turn down a street you don’t know? Want to get your location and see if you can plan a new route? Forget it. The iPhone always takes several minutes to get a proper fix on your location. By the time you do, you’ll already have figured it out yourself.
My wife and I were driving to Microcenter one day. I wanted to call ahead to find out if they had something. Microcenter was 15 minutes away. Rather than paying 411 charges, I decided to try to bring up the web site on Safari so I could look it up. Granted their web site is not designed for mobile platforms, we arrived at Microcenter before I managed to find the phone number. Pulling up web pages on the iPhone is just that slow, smack in the heart of a major metropolitan city.
And I swear, the browser on the iPhone is no faster on wifi than it is on 3G.
The iPhone is a really good smart phone. Local apps (anything not accessing the internet) work really well. But that’s what it is. A smart phone that has a gratuitous web browser because people would complain if it didn’t have one. But it’s really quite useless for that purpose. Apple, I mock thee for trying to insinuate that the iPhone could make any kind of substitute for a netbook.
3G is extremely fast on MY iPhone, but then again I’m not in the US. 3G on AT&T seems to be the issue in most cases.
GPS – well, that is how long a GPS device can take to get a lock. Depends on the hardware, but many devices can take up to 5 minutes. It depends on location and line of sight of the sky to detect the GPS signal being bounced off of the satellites. If the GPS receiver isn’t in direct line of sight (as in inside your car) or in a major metro area with lots of tall buildings, you will be out of luck. It’s only the fact that the iPhone uses AGPS, that the fix is often vague but quick. Believe me, having programmed in car black boxes with GPS, it can be a lot worse! As for accuracy – the data is only as good as the amount of satellites in view – you need at least 3 to get a good triangulation.