Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Sep 2012 19:24 UTC
"The major new feature of the company's new iOS 6 mobile operating system is a new mapping module developed by Apple itself - a replacement for the Google-supplied maps that have been standard on the iPhone since it debuted in 2007. It is a change borne not of user demand, but of corporate politics: Google's Android platform is the biggest competitive threat to the iPhone, so Apple is cutting ties with Google. iPhone owners might have loved Google Maps, but Apple has no love for Google. Unfortunately, Apple's new maps are simply not as good as Google's." That's putting it mildly - my own town barely even exists on Apple's maps. It's basically a trainwreck, and according to The Verge, Apple has been working on this for the past five years. This is what happens when a company cares more about stupid grudges than its customers. Considering how much effort it has taken Google to get where it is now with maps, don't expect Apple's maps to even get near Google Maps any times soon. This isn't going to take months - this is going to take several years, if at all.
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Member since:
2005-07-13
While doing a search I noticed a number of research papers and patents about automatically generating data from satellite imagery. I don't know to what extent these technologies are used though.
I thought the following article was particularly interesting. It's about Google's project "Ground Truth" for building maps: http://tinyurl.com/cl85h5l
Interestingly, the article supports your claim that building a comparable mapping database to Google's would be a very hard task: "I came away convinced that the geographic data Google has assembled is not likely to be matched by any other company."
I wouldn't know, having never used one of these...
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That's too bad. I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me!
True, but they did have a previous relationship with Microsoft, which I believe was destroyed and then rebuilt for commercial reasons.
I was under the impression the JVM on OS X used to be an Apple product?
It's clear Nokia Maps are bad compared to Google for the places you gave (and no doubt many others). The difference is quite startling. However, in some places the balance is the other way:
Compare http://goo.gl/maps/xcl1Z with http://nok.it/FmcWg
Just to be clear though, I'm not suggesting NavTeq is better (or necessarily worse) than Google. But there are a lot of impressive mapping companies, ideas and datasets out there, and the mapping landscape is changing rapidly (so to speak). I'm excited to see all of the new developments that are happening in this area.