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Title: Hands on with Google Maps for iPhone Post by: HCK on December 13, 2012, 07:01:00 pm Hands on with Google Maps for iPhone
The furor over Apple’s Maps app has diminished somewhat since it peaked shortly after the release of iOS 6, but there are still people who have been holding out on upgrading to Apple’s latest mobile operating system, worried about what they might lose. As of Thursday, those people have nothing left to wait for: After months of speculation, Google has released its own Maps app for the iPhone. (There’s as of yet no native version for the iPad, but as Google also launched its YouTube for the iPhone several months before it brought the app to the iPad, that’s not a huge surprise.) But if you’re expecting a carbon copy of the app that graced home screens in iOS 5 and earlier, you’re going to be surprised. On first launch, you’ll be greeted with a splash screen asking you to help improve Google’s Maps by submitting anonymized location data to improve traffic and other services (you can opt out if you wish). That’s not surprising: Apple does much the same thing with its own Maps. Google, however, next offers a feature that Apple doesn’t: By signing into your Google account, you can retrieve your favorite places and past searches and directions that you’ve used with Google Maps on the Web while logged into that same Google account. That said, you can instead opt not to log in by tapping a Skip button in the top right corner. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here http://www.macworld.com/article/2020193/hands-on-with-google-maps-for-iphone.html |