AJ Dellinger from Digital Trends put together an in-depth comparison of the two mapping apps and has come to the conclusion that, yes, Google Maps is vastly superior to Apple Maps. A big part of this has to do with the fact that Google is in the business of data and Google Maps is simply an extension of that.

The user interface is both more intuitive and faster on Google Maps, typically required “half as many taps” as Apple Maps to get the same task accomplished. Google Maps has better viewing modes, making it easier to see the streets, as well as having better traffic data. While Apple’s Flyover is nice, Street View is still much more usable and more widespread.

He goes on to say that Google Maps has better search (no surprise there), better directions and navigation, better public transit support (more data), and better destination information with Google+ Local and Zagat.

If you have iOS6, you really should get Google Maps. You don’t want to get stranded in the middle of the Outback with a worse user interface, worse destination information, and no Flyover in less populated areas (like the Australian Outback).

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That line comes by way of Australian police officials. More specifically, the police of Victoria are urging motorists to avoid using Apple Maps altogether, because the inaccurate directions could lead people into the middle of the Australian Outback. Remember that when you get lost in the Outback, you really are in the middle of nowhere. You could be left with no food, no water, no gas stations, and no shelter from the potentially sweltering heat.

Apple Maps is, for whatever reason, placing the town of Mildura about 70km away from its actual location. People trying to get to Mildura, using Apple Maps, are instead ending up in Murray Sunset National Park and “there is no water supply within the Park and temperatures can reach as high as 46 degrees [Celsius].”

It’s one thing to get annoyed at being sent to the wrong part of town when you want to visit a certain store; it’s another thing altogether to end up in a situation where you could die by dehydration and heat exhaustion. Be sure to review those driving directions to make sure they make sense before you actually start driving!

So are Apple Maps really all that bad? Honestly, it depends on where you live. In some parts of the world, Apple has already done enough to update its maps and ensure improved accuracy. In other places, like parts of Australia, you might want to use them at your own risk.

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The post Apple Maps Could Be “Potentially Life Threatening” appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It looks like the problems with the new Apple Maps aren’t the only ones plaguing the iPhone 5. It turns out that the autocorrect feature is adding “random” accents to anything you type in Italian. There have been multiple reports of this issue in Italy, so it’s not just affecting a small handful of users.

I can’t speak or read Italian, but I do understand that accents can have a dramatic effect on words, completely changing their meaning. Present tense becomes past tense and the word for “and” can become the word of “he is,” for example. This comes about when you use the autocorrect feature with iOS6 and, well, everyone uses autocorrect on their smartphones these days.

While the autocorrect seems to “learn” its mistakes when the user manually selects the correct replacement, this process can take up to seven iterations for that single mistake. Considering how many words in Italian have (and don’t have) accents, you can see how this problem would affect nearly every possible piece of text you could type up on the iPhone.

So, what is the only current solution to “Accent-gate” on Italian-language iPhones? Turn off autocorrect…. or, if it makes any sense for you, switch to another language until Tim Cook and the team at Apple fix this issue.

The post Mamma Mia! “Accent-gate” Hits Apple iPhone in Italy appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The iPhone 3GS was first unleashed onto the mobile world in June 2009 and while it was only a marginal improvement over the iPhone 3G that it replaced, it was noticeably faster and more responsive. Even so, it’s a little funny looking back at those specs today. A single core 600MHz processor? Just a 3MP camera? A mere 320×480 pixel resolution? Yeah, that just won’t cut it these days.

When the iPhone 4S entered the fray last year, the 3GS became the free entry-level option and the iPhone 4 became the mid-tier option. With the iPhone 5 prepped and ready to headline the show starting next week, the iPhone 4S gets bumped to the mid-tier and the iPhone 4 is now the free-with-contract entry-level smartphone from Apple. The interesting thing is I hear iOS6 will be supported by the 3GS, so it’s not like the team in Cupertino has completely abandoned you.

Goodbye, iPhone 3GS. You had a pretty good run there. Now Apple can continue coasting as we await the inevitable arrival of the iPhone 5S next year.

The post Official: iPhone 5 Killed the 3GS appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It’s pretty much for certain that the new iPhone will be revealed to us next month and we’re fully expecting a larger display, but it looks like the new iOS6 comes with an extra bonus to take advantage of that extra screen real estate.

You see, the current rumor says that the new iPhone will have a 640 x 1136 pixel resolution screen. This gives it the same width as the existing 3.5-inch iPhones, but it adds the extra size in height. And so, using some tweaks to the iOS Simulator application that comes with the iOS Dev tools, the guys at 9to5mac were able to get the rumored resolution of 640 x 1136 to display.

The interesting thing is that when they used this resolution with a simulated iOS 5.1, they still get the same four rows of icons (plus the home dock) that you normally get, except there is more vertical spacing between the rows. Switching to a simulated iOS 6, though, and suddenly that “extra” height was filled in with a fifth row of icons. This offers some confirmation of the newer screen size and resolution, since it didn’t scale properly at other resolutions, but nothing is for certain until Tim Cook tells us it is.

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The post iOS6 Resolution Scales to 640×1136 on iPhone 5 with Added Icon Row appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

One of the many changes that you’ll find in iOS 6 is the departure away from Google Maps and toward Apple’s own Maps app based on OpenStreetMap data. So, which is better and how do they compare? The best way to determine that is to look at them side by side.

You might already be familiar with the look and feel of the new Apple Maps, since Foursquare recently jumped ship over to OpenStreetMap too. It’s very fresh and clean-looking, but that comes at a significant price: it lacks details. When you look at the equivalent Google Maps image for the same area, you’ll find that Google bombards you with much more information about street names, transit stops, and points of interest. You only start to get some of this extra information when you zoom in quite a bit, which can be annoying if you’re trying to look for a specific street.

Similarly, traffic on Apple Maps is still quite lacking in information, but the crowdsourced nature of OpenStreetMap will hopefully improve that as iOS 6 is adopted by more people. Both Google Maps and Apple Maps do a good job of providing directions, but they do have their respective strengths: Google Maps can give you public transit directions, but Apple Maps can give you turn-by-turn directions. Google Maps is also the only one with Street View at the moment, though Apple Maps has that Flyover feature.

The shift to greater simplicity has always been a part of Apple’s M.O., so it’s not really surprising to see that Apple Maps is generally simpler than its Google counterpart. It’s simplicity at the price of more robust information.

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The post New Apple Maps for iOS 6 vs. Google Maps Comparison appeared first on Mobile Magazine.