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Our roads frighten and confuse the new Apple Maps

Charles Street

Tammytantrum noticed that Maps doesn't realize that Boston has more than one Charles Street (three, actually); anybody who follows the map to the Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro is going to get just a bit confused.

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Comments

Dorchester's has even more glitches: A bunch of sites on Washington St on the Freedom Trail (like Old City Hall) appear there as well as in the Dorchester part of Washington Street. And an auto dealership in Newton on a similarly-named street also appears in Dorchester. Dix Street is all in caps for one reason. Oh, and Meeting House Hill is called "Meeting Housing Hill" (!)

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My sarcastic contribution to the daily iOS Maps hate: don't they know that Ray Allen is gone?

Can I mention—as a cartographer, not an Apple fanboy—how crazy it is that in the span of only 6 or 7 years people have come to expect absolute perfection from detailed maps of the entire freaking world? I get that it's bad that Apple replaced something good with something inferior, but wow, suddenly every minor error is the Worst Thing in the History of the Universe.

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ain't it?

honest to good, integrated google maps, navigation, address book, gmail, and search is the reason I'm an android user.

Apple is flashy, and they might have neater bells and whistles; but google is reliable and functional for what I need in a phone/mini-moble PC.

I still carry a separate iPod Classic though. Still the best MP3 player, IMHO.

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I manage corporate Exchange accounts on mobile devices as part of my job. IPhones set up effprtlessly are almost 100 % glitch-free. Set em and forget em. Not so with Droids. Multiple sync issues and other glitches. Many users, even anti Apple peeps have up and got iPhones. I wish everyone at my company would. My job would be a lot easier.

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I was an Android user and loved the phone--especially the maps. Everything except email and calendar worked well. The only problem was that those were the two killer apps.

The Android maps app was so far above the Apple maps app it wasn't funny. It's nigh perfect. Why can't I have my cake and eat it, too?

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Well let me be the anecdote antithesis to your anecdata. I have an iPhone and the calendar sync with Outlook is awful. It frequently drops appointments if the something is changed. The mail sync is sllllooooowww but that might be a server problem - I have no way of knowing. At least I can (finally!) attach files from an email. I don't know if Android would work better for me because I'm tied to an iPhone and (even worse) AT&T with work, but not all is shits n giggles.

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Prince St in JP has the Corner Cafe and Parzale's Bakery, which I thought were in the North End. Maybe if they were there when Sylvia Plath was growing up a few doors down, things might have ended differently for her (she at least might have had a much different perspective of ovens). Boylston Place, steps away from the Stony Brook T stop between Amory and Washington St is the new nighttime hotspot, with famous bridge-and-tunnel venues such as The Estate, Sweetwater Cafe and the Liquor Store. South Station is now located at the Monument and Beacon Hill's Primo Restaurant has moved to Myrtle St and Legal Seafoods is nearby on Park Place, behind the JP Post Office. The Old State House, Old South Meeting House, the Jewelry Exchange, Bruggers Bagels, Sweet, Empire Garden, Meyers & Chang, among others have moved to Washington or School streets in Dorchester. Tufts Medical and State St MBTA Stations (the basement of the aforementioned Old State House), B Good, Macy's, King's Chapel, Beatown Pub, Nine Zero, The Corner Mall, The Opera House, Lamberts, Encore Lounge, Hermes and Charles River Plaza's parking garage (which must be really inconvenient for those carrying groceries from Whole Foods) and most of Chinatown have all moved to Allston or Brighton. No word on where the Orange Line is.

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I gotta say although some of the mistakes are funny, I really do like the app. I've tried it here and in NYC and it worked great. I only found mistakes when I actively searched for them. Seriously, the thing is fast (vectors drawn and resize a lot faster than bitmaps like Google) and turn by turn is clear and a godsend. I trust Apple to come through soon enough. In the meantime there are a ton of alternatives (including Google Maps via your browser, which is said to be getting Street View in a few weeks on mobile devices) so the end of the world it ain't.

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And you got this inferior replacement service, AND hardware that was state of the art in 2010 foisted on you for the low low price of $900!

It's like the entire Apple-using world has Stockholm syndrome, and is competing to see who can declare it loudest on the internet.

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Oh stop. There's more to an iPhone than only maps, and there are a TON of other map apps anyway. ($900? I don't even know where you got that number.)

Enough with the entitlement whine. Or should we all start detailing all the places where Android falls flat?

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Feel free to do so. Your list re. Android would be shorter than others' re. iOS.

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I was burned once with my old 3G, which became inoperative for 3 days after a software upgrade.

Now I wait several months for the bugs to be worked out. In the meantime, I still have perfectly functioning Google Maps on my phone.

In the scheme of things, its a small issue and I still think the phone is a great product. Hopefully, it has caused Apple to focus and they will now make it even better when it is fixed.

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I just helped close a deal on 48 Charles Street, Hyde Park and have noticed mail piling up that was meant for 48 Charles Street, Boston (Beacon Hill). And why did I know that the mail wasn't meant for 48 Charles Street, Hyde Park? Because it's new construction.

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I just spent the past couple of weeks depending on phone maps to navigate me around.

  • BlackBerry Maps (BB 9900/OS 7.1) - Requires 'net connection. Minimal features. Useful only because the BB has the best battery life of any device and thus is the only one still working at 3am. The last chance to get you there, but if it's what you've got use it.
  • Google Maps (HTC Amaze/OS 4.1) - Requires 'net connection to navigate, but can show maps (no POI) in previously stored areas. Has the most features but regularly gives odd directions involving extra miles of directions & reversing course.
  • Nokia Drive (Nokia Lumia 710/OS 7.5) - Takes advantage of 'net connection or falls back to offline mode using previously stored maps & POI. Has best get-you-there navigation that chooses routes as well as a person would, etc. Street layout always correct but occasionally labelled with wrong names.

I was traveling last month on a Buffalo, Locksport, Rochester, Corning New York, Scranton Pennsylvania, Hempstead & NYC New York trip . This month was Seattle, Redmond, Evanston, & Bainbridge Island, Washington State. Then Bozeman Montana through Yellowstone Nat'l Park, Grand Tetons Nat'l Park, Cokeville Wyoming, Evanston Idaho, Park City & Salt Lake City Utah. So lots of use in very different scenarios.

Of the three Nokia Drive was the best.

Nokia Drive doesn't have Street View, nor does it speak the names of streets, but it doesn't send me two miles in one direction to reverse me three in the opposite direction as Google Maps occasionally does. I've also found the Nokia Drive routing is better at choosing primary highways, not parallel secondary routes (often the original route) rife with stoplights & minimalls. Nor does it have Google's infuriating (& dangerous) habit of taking shortcuts across off & on ramps to save 20' travel distance.

Finally while one can preload largish blocks of territory to Google Maps (about 1/4 of Massachusetts in a block) it can't generate directions or looks up POI while offline. That was the dealbreaker for me - I'm regularly away from data connections, changing routes (road closed due to fires, etc.) and need to look up several possible destinations, by name, which only the Nokia Drive could do.

Alternative apps include Waze (Android & iOS) which works wonderfully in high-population techie places with it's community sharing of traffic & incidents. Route 66 (Android) can do a heads-up display style overlay of route over live video, so your phone (using it's rear camera) shows the road ahead with where-to-go overlaid on top; cute but novelty & I feel too distracting. Then there is online Nokia Maps (which is apparently now recommended by Apple for iOS users): http://m.maps.nokia.com

And yes, I also have a recent model Tomtom (away visiting SF with family this week) that is regularly updated. It works comparably to Nokia Drive, can use my cellphone's data connections for some lookups, and like the Nokia can preload maps & POI by state or nation. While it can have some other apps installed it really is a single-tasker that doesn't integrate with my email (click on addresses to get directions), play audio books, & has a horrible abcdef keyboard instead of proper qwerty making entering anything just aggravating.

Lastly, I've also an iPhone but I rarely use it. Email, interface, camera, connectivity, directions, battery life, Facebook etc.; it isn't better then the others at anything beyond being a brand name, so it stays home or gets lent out to friends with broken iPhones (I swear they're made of cast sugar!)

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