Out there beyond the towns and cities, beyond the reach of 3G and Wifi, are the places where map apps on your smartphone are most needed. It’s also where most of them run into problems.
Try calling up a Google or Nokia map when you’re outside digital civilization, and you’ll find little if any information has been preserved. Google Maps for Android lets you select a 50-mile square to download for offline viewing, but woe betide you if you stray outside that 50 miles â€" you’ll be greeted with an unusable blur.
So what if you’re the adventurous type who wants to venture into the undownloadable, service-free yonder? Then you’ll want to call on a quiet and unlikely champion: Apple Maps.
Now, there are many negative things to say about Apple’s nascent smartphone mapping app. I’ve already written most of them. I believe it was released far too precipitously, given that Apple still had a year left on its license to use Google Maps. The bugs were widespread and obvious enough that heads should roll in Apple quality control, if not at the top of its software business.
The company should also offer iOS 6 users the option to re-download Google Maps, rather than offer the inferior Hobson’s choice of maps.google.com on Safari, while it fixes those issues.
But Apple Maps has also saved my bacon. On a trip to the UK this weekend with a U.S. iPhone, my wife and I had no need to buy an expensive international data package, pay roaming charges or swap out the SIM card to get anywhere.
For the phone’s most important worldly use, getting me from A to B â€" especially when B happened to be a wedding in a remote, service-free corner of the West Country â€" Maps performed surprisingly well. Once I’d looked at a map of the UK on Wifi once, it was all available down to street level when offline. Navigating dark country roads at night became a breeze.
Sure, Apple Maps is still bare bones when it comes to details around those roads. And I have a few new laughable naming errors to add to my collection. Londoners have been surprised to find their city contains a central neighborhood called “Little Britain.†The ancient and important port town of Bideford in North Devon, to name just one example I visited, isn’t named at all (though its eponymous hospital is).
It’s also far too easy to switch from a 2D to a 3D view, when you’re simply trying to zoom in on a map. Too often the app interprets the zoom as a two-finger swipe â€" but given that there’s a 3D button right there on the screen, a two-finger swipe to go to 3D is entirely unnecessary.
But the fact that most of an entire country was visible at the granular level, just from one quick look at it on Wi-Fi, was truly astonishing. It’s a feature that Apple has kept surprisingly quiet.
The company has talked a little about vectors, which are the secret sauce behind this offline mapping ability. (Vectors are dynamic grid-based information, whereas the bitmaps in Google Maps were static images.) But that doesn’t translate too well for the average user.
It’s possible Apple doesn’t feel offline maps is a feature that’s ready for primetime yet. Indeed, it didn’t behave perfectly. Sometimes, if I went off the edge of the current map screen, I would be presented with a blank grid â€" and would have to zoom out and in again in order to revive the offline map.
Turn-by-turn directions for any offline journey will have to be started while you’re in a coverage area, or Wifi. But they still direct you just fine once the data disappears.
And there’s another bonus to all this preloaded mapping: the app downloads much less data than Google Maps when you are connected, as both Macworld and AppleInsider have confirmed â€" up to 80% less.
So will this experience convince me to use Apple Maps back in my always-online world? Not necessarily, or not without caution. I’m still going to want to tote an iOS 5 or Android device as backup.
But it’s nice to know that if the wanderlust takes me on a whim to deserts, mountain ranges or countries with expensive data roaming charges, I need never worry about being truly lost again.
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