I'm wiring this story on y iPhone this morning because after my upgrade to "the worlds most advanced operating system," iOS 6, I got Los in New Jersey on my way to work.
Ok so that's not entirely tue. i am on my iphone (couldn't you tell?), but I got to work just fine. I know my office is in manhattan. Yet concerninly, Apple'a new maps app does not. And even after I gave apple my location (Chelsea) and specifically asked it to locate aol's office building in "new York, ny," it tried to send me to Bayonne, New Jersey. Fortunately, Apple maps doesn't offer transit directions, so it couldn't tell me how to get there. I'd have to search a different service altogether for that information,, which hopefully, had i not known my destination, would have set me straight.
With its new upgrade, apple, the company built on intuitive devices and an "it just works" philosophy, has committed the ultimate sin of making our lives more difficult, not less. For all its brainpower and talent, it has bafflingly taken two of the things we do most on a smartphones -- look for directions and type -- and either made them worse or left them bad. Mobile devices are at the core of the most pivotal, high-stakes battles being waged in the tech world. ANd yet there's Apple, making sure that the things we spend the most time doing on our phones -- as crucial to their business as ours -- will be more difficult, frustrating and inefficient. That isn't just bad for us. It goes without saying its also bad for apple.
With iOS 6, my google maps app --seven years and several million dollars in the making -- was replaced by apples new-and-improved maps app that features a beautiful 3d flyover view of major cities, but completely unreliable location information and a 5 ear-old tourist's sense of direction. Lexington avenue, what's that? Brooklyn somewhere? Berlin? Never heard of it.
The list of apple maps bloopers includes missing "chunks of road," imaginary railway stations, invented airports, renames towns and erased buildings. Apple even misplaced its own Apple store in Sydney.
And what iOS changed with maps is, in my opinion, just slightly moe important than what it failed to chnge with the new release: autocorrect on iDevices is as poor as it ever was.
Though iOS 6 will support "autocorrection for every keyboard" for the first time, meaning typing via external keyboards will also have autocorrect, apple announced no new upgrades to its au correct technology. Which means we"re stuck writing like this, or else wasting time rewritig words while poking a our phones to try to delicately make a change. In the Soon-to-be-released version of Hoogle's (and for the record, autocorrect just switched my correct "googles" to "Hoogle's" right there) Android operating system, the predictive keyboard has been upgraded with a "new predictive algorithm" Engadget calls "hugely noteworthy." I can't wait to try it. Already, Google's keyboard shows multiple laternatives for misspelled words as you type, no extra clicks necessary, and helpfully gives you the option of manually adding a word to the phone's dictionary directly from the text field you're typing in. On the iPhone, reaching autocorrect a new word (or adding chosrtcuts for phrases) takes a more dedicated effort. Android alo lets users choose which keyboard to use. Don't like the default one? Just download another.
To be fair, Apple's autocorrect isn't all bad. But one of Apple's key strengths, one that has helped it command such a dedicated fanbase, has been its ability to anticipate what we'll need and intrdocue incrementally better experiences with each new release. We've come to expect that a new Apple device will find a delightful way to make our lives easier, even in some tiny way. And in that sense, an unimproved utocorrect is a letdown.
Though different surveys offer slightly different answers, , searching for directions and typing consistently rank among the top uses for smartphones.
73 percent of cell phone owners use their phones for text messaging and 38 percent for email, a pew survey found. And we spend 11 minutes a day emailing on our phones and ten minutes texting.
Apps offering "maps/navigation/search" are one of the most popular categories of apps, according to a 2011 pew study, which found that 51% of app downs losers had used an app in that genre in the month preceding the survey. Accorsinf to the wall street journal, 90 percent of iphone users use google maps.
It seems doubtful as many will use Apple'a maps app.
"If being able to navigate is important to you," te Australian business review told its readers, "we'd recommend that you not consider upgrading to iOS 6 for now."
If wing able to communicate is important to ou, you might consider looking elsewhere too. You wouldn't lose your way AND the meaning of what youre trying to say, wojld you?
Sent from my iPhone
Also on The Huffington Post:
Related
Before You Go
