Reaction to Apple Maps announcement

What they announced

As predicted by the entire world, Apple announced their new maps application today as part of iOS 6. You can see the keynote presentation of the video here, and Apple's summary information about the Maps app here. Overall my predictions from last week were pretty spot on :) ... they announced that it would have turn by turn directions with voice guidance, real time traffic information crowdsourced from other iPhones, and integration with Siri that would let you say you wanted to stop for gas (among other things). And then of course they showed 3D maps based on C3 technology that looked cool as everyone expected, but that was pitched as a cool extra rather than the main substance.

More detail on functionality

The basic 2D map display looked nice. It uses vector graphics so it allows for very smooth zooming and rotating, and labels rotate too. It includes a simple 3D mode, with basic gray buildings, similar to what Google Maps has.

They showed nice looking local search functionality. They said that they currently have about 100 million business listings. There was more detail for each listing than on the current Google Maps functionality, including Yelp reviews, photos and the ability to make restaurant reservations using OpenTable. Also when you zoom in close on the maps, you see points of interest displayed and can select them directly from the map.

The navigation functionality looked nice, and integrates with Siri as mentioned above. They also said that it will monitor traffic in real time and if the route ahead is congested it will tell you if it can identify a faster alternative route and give you the option to take that instead. With around 250 million iPhones sold, and no option to turn off the anonymous location tracking that contributes to the crowdsourced traffic information, Apple has a very rich source of data for its traffic information system, which is likely to be a strong advantage compared to its competitors. The navigation functionality continues to work on the lock screen when the phone is locked.

Another interesting development is that a good number of major car manufacturers have committed to adding a button on their steering wheel within the next 12 months that will activate Siri on your iOS device, which will make iOS devices even more attractive as in car devices.

The 3D views using the C3 technology indeed looked great and appeared to perform very well. They included functionality to rotate around a selected point of interest.

What it doesn't have

The most obvious thing missing from Apple Maps that Google Maps has is Street View. They also didn't mention anything about an offline mode, which Google announced last week. However, it's worth noting that in follow up conversations on Twitter, Ed Parsons said that there is no offline routing, which limits the usefulness of that (incidentally, I recently did a driving tour of southern Spain and used some software called iGo which has all its data stored offline, though with an option to connect to get traffic information, and I was impressed with how well it worked - this is just one of several third party apps that work offline). Another thing missing, which I use a lot on Google Maps on my iPhone, is routing using public transit. They said that they will have hooks for third parties to add transit apps into Maps, it will be interesting to see how that works and whether it provide a consistent user interface to transit information like Google does (I would guess not).

And of course, as expected, this is strictly an iOS application. For people developing web based mapping applications, like me, this won't impact what we're doing.

2D Street Data

One of the major questions among geo-geeks was what data source Apple would use for its maps. The street data is primarily from TomTom, as shown in this screen shot at Verge. This is as I predicted too - I'm a big fan of OpenStreetMap but it just isn't there yet in terms of completeness and quality for a global navigation focused application. TomTom and NAVTEQ (now part of Nokia) are the two established options and the only really viable ones for Apple to use for a direct replacement of Google Maps today.
There is quite a long list of other data sources they used here, which does include OpenStreetMap. As I mentioned in my previous post, this raises some interesting issues about licensing terms of OpenStreetMap data, in that if you enhance OpenStreetMap data the terms say you should make that data available under the original terms. Though on Twitter, Richard Fairhurst said:

@pmbatty Yes! My entirely personal opinion (FWIW) is that map share-alike on a "bulk aggregation" level is too complex => being ignored.

The list has quite a collection of other interesting data and sources too, including US parcel data from CoreLogic, satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe, Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail data from the UK, and data from Waze, Urban Mapping, Flickr, NGA, USGS and quite a few more - so quite a who's who of companies with interesting geospatial data.

Apple emphasized in its presentation that this was a worldwide initiative, and based on this list of data sources they should have pretty comprehensive global coverage for street data.

One interesting question is the nature of the relationship between Apple and TomTom. As I mentioned previously, Apple is anonymously tracking all iPhones, with no ability for people to opt out, so that is a hugely valuable resource for maintaining a street database. If you suddenly see lots of phones traveling at 30mph plus along a path that's not in your database, you know you need to make an update there. Or if the direction of traffic along a street isn't consistent with your "one way" data, you can see that immediately. So I would expect they have an agreement to feed this data back to TomTom (who have been using similar data fed back from their own navigation devices for some time). So this becomes quite a strategic relationship for both companies. One interesting question that has floated around on Twitter already is whether Apple might buy TomTom at some point. The market for dedicated navigation hardware will surely go away quite soon, with the capabilities of software that will run on phones and tablets. And there is also significant downward price pressure, especially now that both Apple on iOS and Google on Android provide navigation software for free. I would think that makes TomTom's longer term prospects questionable so you could certainly see a scenario where it might make sense for Apple to buy them.

3D data

One thing that Apple wasn't very specific about is the coverage for the cool looking 3D data. This will presumably start with a small number of cities and expand over time. In the demo they showed San Francisco and Sydney. In the bookmark pulldown that flashed up briefly, I saw the following cities listed:

• Montreal, Canada
• Seattle, WA
• Copenhagen, Denmark
• Miami, FL
• Melbourne, Australia
• Chicago, IL
• Los Angeles, CA
• Las Vegas, NV

No guarantee that all of these have 3D data of course, but seems like a reasonable bet that they all do.

Summary

Overall I think it looks like Apple has done a nice job with the new maps application. It's missing Street View and transit directions are being left to third parties so it remains to be seen how that will work out. But search for points of interest adds some nice features like Yelp and OpenTable integration, turn by turn directions with voice guidance and Siri integration is a huge plus for existing iPhone users, and the 3D view adds wow factor, if being of questionable usefulness. So overall I think that the great majority of the 250 million or so iPhone users will switch to using Apple Maps when iOS 6 comes out. It will be interesting to see if Google continues to offer Google Maps on the iPhone, and if so whether they will give it the same features as the Android version, in particular the turn by turn navigation features. It is hard to imagine that they wouldn't (assuming they continue to offer it), as otherwise it would be at a strong disadvantage to the Apple Maps app. In their event last week they did specifically talk about offering new features on iOS, so presumably they will. Some had speculated about whether Apple would allow them to continue, but there are already many third party mapping and navigation applications, so I think it is unlikely that they wouldn't.

I am currently upgrading my iPad to the beta version of iOS 6, so I hope to be able to do a hands on report fairly shortly. There is no going back to iOS 5 apparently, so fingers crossed that it will work out!

Update: I also recommend reading Mark Prioleau's commentary.

A couple of discussions on location privacy and the iPhone

So my recent posts analyzing the iPhone location data log have gained a lot of traffic and attention over the past few days, from places including the Toronto Star, the Wall Street Journal, TUAW, PC World, MacDailyNews, Apfeltalk (German), Cisco, Pete Warden at O'Reilly, Business Insider, and more.

This led to me being invited to participate in a discussion on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday on radio WNYC, the NPR affiliate in New York, together with Jennifer Valentino-Devries of the Wall Street Journal. We had a good sensible discussion, in contrast with a lot of the hysterical reporting that has been going on.

Today I will be taking part in a longer discussion on the KQED Forum discussion show in San Francisco. Also participating will be Congresswoman Jackie Speier, Jim Dempsey from the Center for Technology and Democracy, and Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. This will be at 10am mountain time, there should be a recording here sometime after that.

Apple issues Q&A on "Locationgate", and addresses key issues

Apple rather belatedly issued a Q&A on the whole "LocationGate" saga. This confirms what I said about the data being a cache of cell tower and wifi locations. The fact that this was kept for up to a year was a bug. Within the next few weeks they will reduce this to 7 days, they will not back up the cache any longer, and they will turn off the cache when you turn location services off, which addresses the issue reported by the Wall Street Journal and widely re-reported.. These are all good actions to take, and address the key issues in my opinion. It does reinforce the importance of developers being careful about location security, and Apple was slack in this case, even though the potential risks were much less dire than widely reported.

Note that in the short term if you are concerned, you can encrypt your iPhone database backup just by checking a box on the front page in iTunes (after plugging in your iPhone). If you do this, the current location log cannot be accessed by someone who hacks into your computer.

The scoop: Apple's iPhone is NOT storing your accurate location, and NOT storing history

The Summary
So in my previous two posts I discussed how the data I was seeing in my iPhone location logs was actually not very accurate, and certainly didn't reveal where I lived or worked or had stayed on my travels - beyond showing the cities I had been to, including general areas I had visited, as well as some I hadn't. There had been some discussion that the data appeared to be, in a number of cases, the location of cell towers you had been in communication with, although in some cases locations were a long way from where you had been.

The quick summary: I believe I have confirmed that Apple is not storing your location, but the (actual or estimated) location of cell towers (and WiFi access points) that are close to you, to help locate you as you move (these are not necessarily towers that you have been in communication with). In the data I have examined there is nothing that is based on the accurate location of the iPhone. For a good example, see my previous post showing the location of cell equipment in Coors Field baseball stadium, and not revealing the location of my home which is very close to there. In my opinion, if Apple was storing this data in order to know where you had been, they would be storing different, more accurate location data that they have access to.

And, importantly, they are not storing history - the only thing that can be found from the files is when you last visited a general area, not if you made repeat visits. This is especially important as it means that many of the concerns expressed about this data are simply not valid: it cannot be used to determine where you live, or work, or go to school, or who your doctor is.

Here is a report of what Al Franken said:

Sen. Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat, said it raises “serious privacy concerns,” especially for children using the devices, because “anyone who gains access to this single file could likely determine the location of a user’s home, the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend and the trips he has taken — over the past months or even a year.”

The only part of this that is correct is that the data will show what cities you've visited, with some indication of which parts of a city you may have visited, though nothing definite - there will be records in areas you didn't visit. And it doesn't show repeated visits to the same location, only the last one.

Update: see below for a very interesting comment from "Anonymous", who includes a link to a document submitted by Apple to Congress in July 2010. This includes the following:

"When a customer requests current location information ... Apple will retrieve known locations for nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points from its proprietary database and transmit the data back to the device" ... "The device uses the information, along with GPS coordinates (if available), to determine its actual location. Information about the device's location is not transmitted to Apple, Skyhook or Google. Nor is it transmitted to any third-party application provider, unless the customer expressly consents". 

The data under discussion in this whole debate is clearly (in my opinion) a cache of the data mentioned here of nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points. I guess the remaining valid concern is that this cache is not stored as securely as it could be, and a fairly large amount of data is stored in the cache. But still this data provides only relatively coarse information as discussed here, and is stored only on the user's own computer, so the risks are relatively minor compared to many of the more dramatic scenarios that have been raised.

Update April 27: Apple has issued a Q&A document about all this, which confirms the conclusions I had drawn, and talks about changes they will make. See my thoughts here.

Read on to find out how I reached these conclusions.

The details
Last night someone called Jude commented on my last post, saying:

My Guess?

It's not a list of cell phone locations that you've been to, but the opposite, a list of cell phone locations near you downloaded to the iPhone from Apple in case you move into range of one of them. i.e. At a guess what is happening is location services identifies a cell tower and asks for its location, and is replied to with the list of locations that contains that cell tower, that list is then cached so that it does not need to be requested again.

Of course, this is only a guess based on the wide range of addresses people are seeing and how its near to, but not exactly where, the people have traveled.

Good thinking Jude! I thought this could explain a lot, so I investigated further. First I looked at some data from my fairly recent New York trip. I looked at the timestamps on some locations and did a query to display all the locations with the same timestamp. I found out that in general, quite a number of records shared the same timestamp, and they would be clustered in the same area. For example, this screen shot shows a set of records that were all loaded at exactly the same time:

This cluster of points is some way above where I drove, I was driving along the Long Island Expressway going east from LaGuardia Airport. The timestamp appears to be in seconds and has 7 decimal places, so it is apparent that this set of data must have been downloaded in a single transaction, it was not obtained by communicating with cell towers at each of these locations independently. It seems reasonable to assume that this data was downloaded to help locate me in the event that I drove into this area (which I didn't). You can observe similar clusters by clicking a dot at random, copying the timestamp, and running a filter in Google Fusion Tables to display all dots with the same timestamp.

What I really wanted to do now was to animate my data, to more easily visualize what was happening. I couldn't figure out an easy way to do this in Google Fusion tables - although it has some capability for this, it wasn't recognizing the timestamp field as a date-time. So I went to look at the data that Sean Gorman had posted of his logs at GeoCommons (my original file had been too large to visualize there without me doing a little more work). GeoCommons has a cool animation capability, which you can try out on Sean's map by dragging the sliders at the bottom left.

I found something really interesting when I zoomed in around the geoIQ office in Arlington, where Sean works. This screen shot shows that between November 11, 2010 and April 20, 2011, there is no record of Sean being at his office.

Now I know that Sean likes to escape for a spot of skiing in Colorado now and then, but that's a pretty long absence for a company President :) ! And I know I have met with him in the office during that time period.

If you drag the time slider a little further, then at the same instant, about 20 more locations appear on the map, covering a general area around the office, roughly half a mile square:

So from this data I can tell that Sean was somewhere in the general area of this half mile square (not necessarily inside it) on April 20. I know nothing about whether he was there before that, and I don't know anything about exactly where he went.

So, this data stored in the iPhone logs is much less revealing than it may initially seem. At a quick glance it does look like it is recording your location history, and I think that Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan were quite right to raise the concerns that they did. It takes some digging in the data to realize that the concerns are not nearly as bad as they appeared at first sight. By publicizing it as they did, and providing their tools and documentation on how to examine the data, they made it easy for others like myself, Sean Gorman and Will Clarke to analyze the data and figure out more about what is going on.

It's still not clear exactly what the data is for, but my guess, as Jude suggested, is that it is to aid in fast location determination - once the iPhone figures out that you're in an area, it downloads data for surrounding cell towers (and Wifi hotspots, a detail I haven't gone into here but the data is available for those too, as discussed in my previous post), so it can quickly locate you as you move around that area (update: see the first comment below, and my addition to the initial summary, which reference a document from Apple that confirms that this is the case).

So to summarize again, there are still some concerns with this data - it does give an approximate indication of places you've been, but not good enough to identify specific buildings or businesses. It doesn't record history - there is no way to tell if you've visited a location multiple times, you can just tell the last time you visited a general area (though there might be clues about multiple visits - for example data showing you visited a neighboring area on a different date, but nothing definitive or detailed about repeat visits). But it definitely doesn't reveal the sort of detailed information that many people have been concerned about.

More on Apple recording your iPhone location history

In my previous post I discussed how the location data being recorded from my iPhone actually wasn't very accurate, and certainly not accurate enough to tell where I live or work (based on the data I've examined so far, which is in a table called CellLocation in the iPhone backup, and is the data discussed by Pete Warden and displayed by his iPhoneTracker app, which is what I used for the visualizations in my previous post). Pete's app aggregated data to a regular grid, partly to provide additional security.

However, I was sufficiently intrigued to follow Pete's instructions to get at the raw data. My investigations with this reinforced the conclusion of the previous post, that the data does not accurately represent your location. But it did show up some interesting new patterns. I loaded the data into Google Fusion Tables and have made it public, you can view it here (and feel free to play around with it).

Here is an interesting map of downtown Denver, where I live.

This shows all the raw point data, with no aggregation or changes. There are actually no dots at all in the block where I live. However, there is a noticeable cluster in Coors Field, the Colorado Rockies baseball stadium which is 3 blocks away from where I live. I haven't been to the Rockies stadium over the time period that this data was recorded. There's also a strong cluster in Mile High Stadium, home of the Denver Broncos.

I would assume that there is additional cell phone infrastructure in these stadiums, to help cope with the heavy concentration of people. A quick Google search found this article about AT&T infrastructure at Coors Field

This reinforces the notion that at least some of these locations are the locations of cell equipment that your phone is communicating with. But I'm not sure that's the whole story.

Here's a map of Cropston, where I spent most of my time on my last two visits to England. It's a small village in a fairly rural area.

Here there are no locations shown in the village itself where I spent most of my time. A lot of the locations are clustered in towns or along streets, but some seem to be more in the middle of nowhere. Hard to draw any definite conclusions.

I just received a suggestion from Jonathan Barnes, via Pete Warden, that the HorizontalAccuracy field may be significant, with lower values indicated accurate locations via GPS. However, I did a quick test, for example this map filters to only show records with this field set to 500.0, the minimum value I found from a quick skim (Fusion tables seems to treat this as a string rather than a number), and while this reduces the number of records it doesn't offer any noticeable change in accuracy - it still includes all the readings from Coors Field and Mile High Stadium where I haven't actually been.

Pete also pointed me at another table in the backup called WifiLocation, which in my case was about 5 times larger than CellLocation. I have loaded this to Fusion Tables here. One interesting thing about this table is that data only shows up in North America (with one random exception in Munich, where I haven't been recently). It seems a little more focused on areas I've been to, but no more revealing in terms of showing specific locations where I've spent time.

As I said, feel free to play with the tables I uploaded, and let me know if you find anything interesting! But my conclusion remains that this data doesn't reveal where you've been with any degree of accuracy.

Update: see my latest post where I conclude that this is data being downloaded from Apple, rather than uploaded, and that detailed history is not stored - thanks to Jude in the comment below for his suggestion about this.

So actually, Apple isn't recording your (accurate) iPhone location

So over the past couple of days there has been mass hysteria, questions in Congress, etc, over the fact that Apple is apparently recording all the locations you've been to with your iPhone without telling you, and storing it without encryption. The news was broken by my friend Pete Warden at Where 2.0 last week and has escalated rapidly since then. As someone who publishes their location anyway (you can see where I am right now by checking the right hand panel on my blog) I was less concerned about this than many, though I agree that Apple should make it clear that they are recording this information and give you the option to turn it off, plus it should be stored more securely.

However, yesterday Sean Gorman posted that he had analyzed his data, and the interesting thing is that it wasn't accurate - it showed the general areas he'd been to, but didn't reveal where he lived or where he worked. And then I also found this post by Will Clarke, followed by this one, which also conclude that whatever the data is, it isn't your accurate location (though I think Will prematurely concludes that it is cell tower locations - Sean's analysis suggests that isn't the case, though it seems it may well be related to this).

I just had a good chat on the phone with Pete about these posts, and about my findings which I'll get onto in a moment, which similarly conclude that whatever is being tracked, it isn't your accurate location. Pete said that their conclusions were similar, but also that he didn't think it was simply cell towers. I know that my iPhone knows my location much more accurately than the locations that I see in the data I've looked at. For me, as for Sean, there was no cluster of points either at my home or my office. Pete asked me if I'm on WiFi rather than 3G at home and at work, and the answer is yes, so there may be some clue there.

But the main point of these posts, and mine, is that this data does NOT indicate where you live, where you work or any exact locations you've been to. This is not reflected in most of the reporting you see about the topic.

I thought I'd share some screen shots of maps that I got, which I actually thought were cool :). Since I travel quite a bit, I have a few interesting examples which might give some clues as to what this location data actually does represent. The detailed (larger scale) maps here show a grid of dots, which is something introduced by Pete's map display tool rather than how the underlying data is. I will try to play around a bit more to get at the raw data, but thought I would share these initial findings first.

So to start with, here's an overview of my world travels of the past few months, which seems pretty accurate, and goes back to at least September:


Here's a view zoomed in on the US. The interesting thing here is that New York has the largest bubble over it, but I only spent two days there on a recent trip (1 day in Manhattan, 1 day on Long Island). Denver where I live has a much smaller blob.


Here's a map of Colorado - there seem to be quite a few outliers here on the south side of the map - I think that the closest I've been to these in recent months is Keystone, where you see a cluster of dots. Some of these dots are probably 50 miles away from where I was.


Zooming in on Denver, you see a lot of activity. I'm sure I haven't covered Denver quite as comprehensively as the dots here suggest.


In this map of downtown Denver you see the gridding which somewhat obscures the underlying data. However, the largest dot is some way away from my home (which as I think everyone knows is above the famous Wynkoop Brewing Company), and the dots are fairly evenly spread - these certainly do not indicate where I spend most of my time downtown.


Similarly, my office (where I usually work a couple of days a week, the other days I work at home) does not jump out on this map of the Denver Tech Center (as you can find out from our web site, the Ubisense office is at 5445 DTC Parkway).


On to my UK travels - I think the data includes two trips there. There seem to be quite a few outliers here also, and some fairly large clusters in places I just passed through on the train. I spent most of my time on these trips at my mother's house in Cropston, just north of Leicester, which isn't reflected in the data. I spent some time in London, but it has a disproportionate representation on the map (as New York did in the US map).


Zooming in to the Leicester area, you can see Cropston just to the north of the city, which is where I spent nearly all my time, and this has no readings. I didn't travel around Leicester nearly as much as the dots would suggest. So this map is very misleading in terms of where I spent my time in this area.


This map of Zurich is interesting: I connected through Zurich airport in November, en route to Denmark. I spent maybe 3 hours in the airport and didn't leave it, but you can see lots of outliers, which are up to about 20 miles away.


Here's a map of my trip to Denmark, where I spent time in Copenhagen, Aarhus and Naestved. The interesting thing on this one is that I just drove straight across the island of Funen (Fyn) in the middle of the map, but you can see quite a scatter of readings on either side of the road, especially to the south on the east side of the island.


Almost at the end ... I included this map of Paris as I thought it was interesting that we traveled from London to Paris and back on the Eurostar train, but no points show up along the route. There's an odd horizontal line of locations to the north of Paris, but nothing apart from that between Paris and London.


And finally an example from Sydney. This shows a disproportionate number of readings at the airport in the south, where I just arrived and left but didn't spend any time. It doesn't show that I spent a good amount of time downtown, and I gave a talk in Paramatta where there is just one isolated dot. I stayed with friends north of Sydney but again you can't tell where.


While I don't want to be an apologist for Apple, and what they are doing here is careless at best, my general conclusion is that this is likely something unintentional, similar to the Google Street View WiFi data fiasco. If Apple wanted to track your location history, why wouldn't they use your accurate location, which I know my phone knows much more accurately than is shown in the data in these files.

The interesting question for us geo-geeks is exactly what the location data is - something related to cell towers seems plausible. I will try to poke around in the raw data a little more. Since I have a few interesting example cases, am happy to share my data if anyone wants to look at it. Pete just tweeted that there is another table with WiFi locations, that would be an interesting thing to explore.

Update: I've done a new post which includes maps with the raw data, using Google Fusion tables. Doesn't change the conclusion that the data doesn't accurately represent your actual location, but does show some interesting new patterns.

Thoughts on the upcoming Apple Tablet

Much of the tech world has been obsessing over the rumored upcoming Apple tablet, which is expected to be unveiled to the world on January 27. So I hesitate to add more to that, but there are so many rumors out there that it's hard to wade through them, so I thought I would throw in a high level perspective on what we are likely to see, and include links to some of the more interesting articles I've come across.

I think the announcement is particularly interesting as Steve Jobs is said to have stopped Apple tablet projects before - according to the New York Times:

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

So if they are announcing this (and you buy this quote, which is plausible), there has to be something substantial about the tablet beyond just being a MacBook without a keyboard or a larger iPhone.

So I think (not based on any inside info, just on filtering all the rumors and thinking about what makes sense from an Apple perspective) that there will be two big ground-breaking things about the Apple tablet.

First, it is widely predicted that the tablet will be Apple's attempt to redefine the world of printed media (like the iPod redefined the music recording industry and the iPhone redefined the mobile phone).
This certainly makes sense. The Kindle and other eReader devices have made an interesting start in that space, but as I said in my initial review of the Kindle, it is good for sequential reading of text, but not good for more random browsing, like reading newspapers and magazines. And indeed the Kindle is only good for text, not for other kinds of media. With the Apple tablet I would assume that of course you will be able to browse arbitrary web sites, but imagine that it is also highly likely that there may be a simplified full screen user interface, which would provide a great platform for magazines, newspapers, book publishers etc to create compelling multi-media content including text, photos, video, audio, etc. Available content would presumably include a mix of free and paid, like the current app store / iTunes models (and this would give the struggling traditional news media industry another potential business model for the future). One interesting potential screen technology for such a device comes from Pixel Qi, who have been linked with the Apple tablet in some posts. Obviously it would also be a good device for watching movies, TV shows, youtube and other video content.

However, I think that doing that alone is probably not enough to hit the size of market that Apple would want. The tablet clearly won't replace an iPhone, as it won't fit in your pocket. So the question would be how many people, if they already have a smart phone and a laptop, would buy another device in between those two (in size and cost), with a lot of overlap in functionality. This is partly a cost question, and partly one of convenience - would traveling techies, even devout Apple fan boys like me, want to carry three devices everywhere: iPhone, Tablet and MacBook? I think not. So I believe that the second big thing is that the device has to be a good replacement for a laptop too, and again there are plenty of rumors that support that.

For this to be the case, obviously there needs to be a mechanism for text entry that is a good alternative to typing on a physical keyboard. A simple on screen touch keyboard probably isn't going to be good enough to persuade people to give up laptops in large volumes. So I think Apple must have more up its sleeve here. One of the more intriguing rumor threads that has appeared in various places is that the new device will have a "steep learning curve", and that the way that you interact with it is "unexpected". Obviously having a steep learning curve is not something that you would expect in general from an Apple device, especially one aimed at the mass market, unless there is a compelling reason for this. So I think that this has to be around a new mechanism for text entry, and more broadly interaction with the device. Apple acquired a company called Fingerworks in 2005, which had a lot of interesting technology in the areas of multi-touch interaction, gestures, and text entry, and Apple also owns a lot of patents in this area - these are discussed in various places including AppleInsider (who also discuss a tactile touch keyboard) and gizmodo. The old Fingerworks web site was recently taken down, which has increased speculation that their technology is involved. One of the more intriguing aspects of this is the use of "chords", which means that you can trigger different actions by pressing different combinations of fingers (for example, your thumb and third finger versus your thumb and fourth finger) - this video at CrunchGear gives some examples. Another is an approach to user interaction where the keyboard and pointing device are integrated, you don't have to move your hands from one place to another as you do with a touchpad or mouse.

So in summary, the two key things that I am looking forward to seeing are a big focus on updating printed media (magazines, newspapers, books), and something intriguing and new in terms of user interaction, covering text entry and new ways of using multi-touch surfaces. The latter could make the tablet another major step forward for computing in general (as the iPhone was in many ways ... I am amazed at how much of my "computing" I do on my iPhone these days).

One final comment is that to meet its aims as a news reading device, you will need the ability to be connected to the Internet all the time, but most people will not want to pay for two separate wireless data plans for their iPhone and Tablet, so it will be interesting to see how they will address that. Obviously I would assume they would support WiFi, but I would also assume that some or all models would also have 3G wireless built in. Will there be an option for simple tethering with an iPhone I wonder (if Fake Steve Jobs' rant - bad language warning! - has been enough to make AT&T finally get their act together!)? Or will there at least be some sort of package deal on a data plan if you have both an iPhone and an Apple Tablet?

I'm looking forward to the announcement on January 27 :) !!

Quick review of iPhoto 09 Places and Faces

I received my copy of Apple's new iLife 09 a couple of days ago, and being a keen photographer have spent quite a bit of time trying out the new features of iPhoto, especially Places and Faces. This is just a quick initial review - I may do a more detailed one in the next few days. Briefly, I very much like Places, with the exception of a few minor niggles, but Faces, despite an undeniable coolness when it correctly identifies someone, was overall a disappointment.

Places does a nice job of mapping geotagged photos. What I especially liked was the way that it clusters groups of photos that are close into a single pin on the map as you zoom out, and it breaks them out as you zoom it. Some other systems out there do this too, but most that I have tried have some issues (for example only displaying a limited number of pictures on a single map). I haven't done serious scalability testing so far, but have about 1700 geotagged photos on my world map so far and performance is good (these are a mixture of precisely geotagged photos with a latitude-longitude from a GPS stored in the photos' EXIF metadata, and others where I have just specified the city for a group of photos). It is easy to specify a location for a single photo or a group of photos, using Google search for geocoding so you can find the usual assortment of landmarks, businesses, etc as well as addresses. The system also generates a nice hierarchy of place names, so for example I can ask for all the photos in Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia or Canada. There are some situations where the reverse geocoding doesn't find a name at some level of the hierarchy, and it uses a label of "Other", but overall this works well. Overall I think it's the nicest implementation of a system for viewing and managing geotagged photos that I have seen so far.

I really wanted to like Faces - the demo certainly looked really cool. I take a lot of photos and manage them in Aperture rather than iPhoto (I currently have 108,000 images in Aperture), and whenever I have time I tag the photos, including names of people in them. So good face recognition has the potential to be huge time saver. It's really cool when it works, and it does work well a good amount of the time, but overall it didn't work correctly sufficiently often that I'm not sure it is as fast as manually tagging names in Aperture. I will probably try to do a more systematic test of this impression over the weekend. There are two ways it can not work - it can find a face in the photo but not know who it is, or it can fail to find a face in the picture at all. The second case happened more often than I expected - it did very poorly with people wearing hats, large sunglasses, or with faces at an angle. Adding a face manually is a lot slower than doing a manual tag in Aperture (which can be a single key press for "favorite" tags, or a single drag and drop otherwise) - you have to click a button, drag to move a box, and drag again to resize a box, click a button, and type two or three characters of a name. There's also a confirmation process where you click to confirm that faces are who the system thinks they are, and (as far as I can tell) this has no ability to confirm multiple pictures at once (for example clicking on the first of a sequence and then shift-clicking on the last, as you normally do to select multiple items) - you have to click on each individual picture. The system could also be a lot cleverer about handling pictures that are taken in a sequence. It is very common with digital photography to take several photos of a group of people in a burst - and the date and time are stored so this situation is easy to identify. If you manually identify people in the first shot of a sequence, this should really carry through to other photos in the sequence, but it doesn't.

Also, as with iPhoto in general, Faces does not seem geared to handling large number of photos. I have 50+ people in my "Faces" already, a lot of whom just appear in a few photos, and there's no easy way to filter these down or organize them into groups etc, so it will be pretty unwieldy as I load more in there.

So overall, I think face recognition is a really exciting technology and it will be hugely useful in the future, but I don't think it's quite there yet based on my experience so far. In addition to improvements in the core recognition technology, there's a lot that Apple could do to make the workflow more efficient - it definitely has the feel of a "1.0" release (which is a little disappointing coming from Apple, with their strong focus on usability). I hope to see the face recognition capability come to Aperture soon though, hopefully with some improvements in the workflow for large volumes of pictures.

iPhone uses WiFi as well as cell signals to determine location

I just went out for a walk around my neighborhood in downtown Denver to test out the new "locate me" capability on my iPhone, and discovered something rather interesting: apparently the system is using not just cell phone signals but also WiFi to determine location, which explains the unexpectedly good first test result I mentioned in my previous post. I discovered this somewhat accidentally, but turning WiFi on and off on the phone made a big difference to accuracy. You do not have to be connected to a WiFi network in order to use WiFi for location determination.

Since I am in a WiFi-rich downtown location, using WiFi gives much more accurate results than triangulating cell phone signals. From a quick walk around the neighborhood here, I am consistently getting within half a block, or perhaps about 50 meters accuracy most of the time, and as good as 10-20m in some instances, when I have WiFi turned on. Of course it won't be nearly that good if you don't have a dense WiFi network, but this is much better than I expected. If I turned off the WiFi on the phone, the results were less accurate. It is a little hard to gauge the accuracy as the map display is zoomed out depending on the level of accuracy that the system thinks it can obtain (and there is a variable size circle displayed). But generally speaking, even without WiFi, the location generally seems to be within a block or two (say 100-200 meters) of the right location - though again this is in a downtown location with a high density of cell towers, so in a rural location it will be significantly less accurate.

If you look at Google's explanation of how "My Location" works, they only mention using cell tower location. I suppose that most of the other phones which have previously run Google Maps Mobile do not support WiFi, so this makes sense. Other vendors such as Navizon have used WiFi location for a while, and indeed they announced a version for the iPhone a little while ago (if you had hacked your phone, since of course it is still officially closed to third party applications at this point). But in general I haven't seen anything saying that Google was using WiFi for location determination.

I did find that the accuracy varied a fair amount from one attempt to another - I could stand on the same street corner and locate myself multiple times in quick succession, and get three different map scales (representing different accuracy levels) back. The true geo-geeks among you can check out this flickr album, which shows photos of the location given by my iPhone as I walked around the neighborhood, and each one is geotagged using my Garmin handheld, which gives a pretty accurate location. I have added various notes as I went through. On an individual photo you can click the map link to get an accurate view of where the photo was taken (you'll need to zoom in a little), and you can also see a map of the whole set.

Anyway, in summary, I am very pleasantly surprised with the performance of the location capabilities so far - the use of WiFi gives a much higher accuracy than I had expected. Not good enough for in-car navigation applications, but definitely good for local search applications.

Update on my original post: Slashgeo reports that the WiFi positioning technology used in the iPhone is from Skyhook Wireless. One other comment I forgot to make before is that the location determination is pretty quick - typically 3-5 seconds for the map to refresh with the location, most of which is probably just the time to redisplay the map using the EDGE network.

Location awareness for iPhone coming soon?

There are unconfirmed rumors via various Mac blogs (GearLive which has photos of what is claimed to be the new update, and this was commented on at MacRumors and The Unofficial Apple Weblog) that the iPhone will soon be getting a firmware update which will add "locate me" functionality to Google Maps. This functionality was released a month or so ago on other Google Maps Mobile platforms, as Ed Parsons and others reported, so it would certainly make sense for it to appear on the iPhone sometime soon. It uses cell tower information to give an approximate location (reports seem to suggest accuracy to within a few hundred meters in urban locations, and lower accuracy in rural locations). Glenn at AnyGeo also just posted about a hardware add-on called locoGPS which will provide real GPS on the iPhone, which of course will give a more accurate location. This currently requires a Jail Broken iPhone (i.e. one that has been hacked to allow third party applications to be installed), but presumably this will change when Apple opens up the iPhone to third party apps in the next few months.

The report at GearLive also says that the new release of iPhone Google Maps will support the hybrid display mode (it currently just provides "Map" and "Satellite" displays), and the new Options screen that they show also adds a new "Drop pin" function, presumably for visually marking a location on the map.

So one way or another, it looks as though hopefully the location determination options for us iPhone owners will be improving soon!

Oh the irony

I switched to using a Mac a few months back, as I've mentioned before. I have been getting quite into Keynote, Apple's presentation tool which competes with PowerPoint, and you can do some really cool things with it that blow PowerPoint away. So I'd been working on my five minute lightning presentation for FOSS4G and it was really a thing of beauty, the transitions and animations were amazing, it had really cool special effects, videos, everything ... George Lucas would have been proud of it.

And then I hear from Paul Ramsey on Friday and he says "we need your presentation in Open Office or PowerPoint format as we'll be presenting them all from the same PC". PowerPoint? PC? Aargghhh!!! Of all the places to force me to convert my beautiful Mac presentation back into a boring old PowerPoint to run on a PC, I didn't think it would be at an open source conference ;) !! Oh well, I'll have to save the launch of my Keynote pyrotechnics for another occasion :). To be fair, Paul has had a huge amount of work organizing all sorts of things for the conference so I can quite understand him wanting to simplify the presentation logistics ... but I figured I still needed to give him a bit of a hard time!

Anyway, it will force me to focus on content versus style. I am talking about the "past, present and future of the geospatial industry" in five minutes, so will be interesting to see if I get through it all before I'm thrown off :) !!

Apple iWeb to support Google Maps

There is just a passing reference in this liveblog from Wired on today's Apple announcements that the latest version of Apple iWeb lets you "drag in Google Maps", so Apple seem to be continuing their close relationship with Google Maps that we saw with the iPhone.
The main subject of the Apple announcements was some new iMacs - which I was quite pleased about, as I've decided to get an iMac to manage my photos, having been impressed with both Aperture and iPhoto on my MacBook, and I'd heard rumors that they were about to launch a new line so held off. Will try out the Google Maps and iWeb stuff when I get one (they're supposed to be available immediately but are not on the Apple web site at the time of writing this).

iPhone after almost a week's experience

Several people asked me to follow up my previous posts about the iPhone again after I'd used it for a little longer, so here's just a quick update before I leave for a week's vacation tomorrow. My overall verdict on the iPhone is definitely a big thumbs up - while of course you can list plenty of features it's missing and lots of areas for improvement, it has so many great features and usability innovations that it's a real pleasure to use.

A few high points:

• The general user experience is great
• Web browsing - especially once you get used to the user interface and learn a few tricks, it's amazing how usable this is on a device with such a small screen. At first I was mainly zooming using the "pinch" technique, but on watching the "iPhone tour" video again I realized that double-clicking zooms you in to the specific area of the page where you double click (so in a page with multiple columns, it will set the display to the width of the column you click on). Though one drawback I hadn't thought about until Dave Stewart from the Microsoft Virtual Earth team mentioned it is that safari intercepts all double click and mouse move events in order to bring you this functionality, which is an issue for many browser based applications (especially mapping ones).
  
• Google maps - my concerns about the local search implementation notwithstanding, it's still very useful and fun in a lot of situations. I was just in bar talking to a friend about my upcoming drive to Vancouver, and he said that he thought that the drive from Vancouver to Whistler was one of the most spectacular that he had done - but we got into a discussion about whether you could just drive on from Whistler to Jasper or would have to backtrack, and in a minute or so Google Maps on the iPhone had resolved the question for us (you can just continue on, so this is added into my plans). And at lunch today I was in a coffee shop and decided to search for local restaurants and look at their web sites, to see how easily I could check out their menus and decide where I'd like to go - this did work pretty well, as each search result included a link to the restaurant web site (and no bogus results were returned in this case)
• The Photo, iPod and Youtube applications are all great
• WiFi support - so far I have been using this most of the time, and get great performance and don't use up minutes on a plan, etc. This will be especially useful when traveling abroad, as the mobile phone companies all really burn you on charging for data over the cell phone networks, so being able to use WiFi will be great.
• It's a chick magnet at parties (my girlfriend Paula's description, not mine!)
  

Some of my top areas for improvement:

• Add a GPS, of course
• Improve local search, as I discussed previously
• While the general user experience is great, there are a lot of areas where they could leverage some of the new techniques but didn't. Automatic rotation of applications into landscape mode is one area I would like to see leveraged a lot more. This is used to good effect in the web browser, which I almost always use in landscape mode as things are much more legible. And it is great in the photo and iPod applications (see the video). But when I'm in mail and I get an HTML formatted email, this is just like looking at a web page and would be far superior in landscape mode, yet this is not supported. As I mentioned previously, maps does not support this when it would be such a natural thing to do. And also, the keyboard is much wider with larger keys when in landscape mode, so it would be great to leverage this in situations where the focus is on data entry - for example in the notes application, or when composing an email, both of which only work in portrait mode. And there are some odd inconsistencies - both photos and maps support the notion of panning and zooming, and both support the same pinching technique for zooming in and out, and dragging with your finger to pan. But in maps, you double tap to zoom in and tap with two fingers to zoom out, whereas in photos, double click will either zoom in or zoom out depending on the situation (which is the same as in the browser). Maps also needs to support the typing auto-correction - it seems to be the only application which doesn't. These sort of things should really be ironed out.

So anyway, overall I'm very pleased with it still.

The secret behind iPhone mania - iLaunch

Well, so after all the hype Apple is estimated to have sold around 500,000 iPhones over the weekend. I only discovered today that this success was largely due to Apple's iLaunch product, announced in the Onion in March - somehow I missed this previously! There is of course plenty of other spoof coverage out there to choose from, like this:Overall I would say that the reviews were very positive, albeit with various caveats about missing functionality and features - there's a good roundup at Time. I would agree with Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe who says "For it's not just cool; this phone is important, in the same way that Apple's first Macintosh computer was important. The Mac showed us a better way to interact with computers, and forced the entire industry to follow its lead."

Issues with Google local search are on other platforms too

I played around with the local search capabilities on Google Maps Mobile on my BlackBerry 8800, and found that it also has the same issues that I discussed with local search on the iPhone. I guess I just hadn't used local search much with Google on my BlackBerry, as I'd been using Telenav which has richer functionality (in particular voice driving directions using the GPS).

Google Maps local search on the iPhone really has some serious flaws

Yesterday I posted my main review of Google Maps on the iPhone, as well as my general impressions of the iPhone. To say some positive things first, I really think that while I've commented on a few areas for improvement, I really think the iPhone is great - it's definitely a jump forward in terms of user interfaces, and I think introduces a lot of ideas in this regard which will become much more widely used. It's just a lot of fun to use. On Google Maps specifically, I talked about a lot of things I liked yesterday, and one other nice feature I have discovered is that the Bookmark page also has a "Recents" tab which saves all your recent searches, routes, etc, and will restore those with all the context - this is especially nice for retrieving routes. Oh, and the built in camera, which I had low expectations of, actually isn't too bad - here are a few sample snapshots in case you're interested.

However, I expressed some reservations about the way that local search was implemented yesterday, and having played around with this some more I really feel that there are some serious issues that need addressing here. There are two main issues: one is the way that the functionality has been implemented, and the other is the quality of the data for points of interest.

Let's take the functionality first. Frankly, Google seems to have lost track of the basic user scenario for local search. I suspect that probably a (conscious or unconscious) contributor to this was the desire to include establishments which paid for placement higher in the list of results, as I commented on yesterday, without it being too obvious that they are doing this. But anyway, the basic scenario for local search is that you identify a location, which might either be where you are now (the most common scenario), or perhaps an address where you plan on being in the future, or where a friend is located. You then search for something close to that place - this might fairly specific, like "tattered cover" (a bookstore I used in my example yesterday) or might be more generic, like "coffee". In either case, knowing how far away each of the search results are from the specified location is a really crucial piece of information in deciding whether that search result is of interest to you. Sorting the results by distance, and knowing that the closest (or the closest 3, or 5, or whatever) results have been shown to you are fundamental requirements. And then if you decide that one of the search results is of interest to you, by far the most common follow up action is that you want to figure out how to navigate from the point you first specified to the search result you have selected.

Most other local search implementations I have used meet these requirements pretty well, but local search on the iPhone fails pretty badly. Using the TeleNav software on my BlackBerry 8800, I choose "Find business" and the first thing it asks me for is the search point, and I have six options for specifying this: current location (which it knows from the GPS, which is of course its big advantage over the iPhone), recent addresses, favorites, key in an address, near airport, or contacts. You then specify the search term, and are immediately given a list of results sorted in order of distance from the search point, and showing how far away each result is. You click on a result and it shows more information including the address, and gives you the option to drive to it, save it, map it, or call it. The one feature which TeleNav does not provide which the iPhone does is the ability to display multiple results on a map at the same time - but it meets the main user scenario much better.

Google Maps online also addresses this user scenario well. You type in the address of the point you are interested in, and hit "Search maps". Then you choose "Find businesses" and you now have two text boxes, one containing the address of the search point, and one for your search term. You hit search and get an ordered list back, by distance, with the distance from the search point displayed for each result. If you click on a search result and ask for directions, the start point is already filled in with the address of the original search point.

But all this goes by the board in Google Maps on the iPhone. You will typically precede a search by centering the screen on a location, most often by typing an address (or retrieving a bookmark). But that point is not explicitly used by the search on the iPhone. Instead, you just get back any ten results which satisfy your search term and which are somewhere within the bounds of the current screen display - except that it's not just any ten, it seems that there is a ranking order which is presumably determined by how much establishments have paid for placement. There is no guarantee that the closest (or closest 3, or 5, etc) are returned. There is no easy way to find out how far away a given search result is from the point you were interested in (the only way I have found is to select a result, display its details, choose "directions to here", and then you have to fill in the start address, which you can do by selecting a bookmark or recent search address, and then calculate a route - and you have to repeat this for every item whose distance you want to know).

I tested a couple of scenarios where there were fewer than ten results in the original map display window, and in this case the map window stays the same and displays pins for the results which are in that area, but you still get a list of ten items (not sure if these are guaranteed to be the ten closest in this situation or not). A bad thing in this scenario is that if you select an item from the list which was not in the original map window, it pans you to that location, but now you have no idea how that relates geographically to your original search point (beyond re-entering the original point and calculating a route).

If there are no search results in the original map window, the map window zooms out so that it fits in all the results (at least in the cases I tried). However, there is no symbol on the map showing where your original point was, so you risk losing your orientation in this situation if it's an area you don't know well, unless you calculate a route from your original point again.

So functionality wise I really think someone lost the plot here. Yes, if you are zoomed in close (i.e. at the default scale which is displayed which you search for an address), the system will find you some results that are "sort of close" to the address you typed, and you get a nice pretty display with animated flying pins. But there appears to be no guarantee that the closest result will definitely be returned (though it probably will in most cases, especially if you are zoomed in close), there's no easy way of determining how far away any given result is (you have to calculate routes individually), there is no way at all of sorting results in order of distance, and in order to calculate a route to a search result you have to re-enter the original search point again (which you can admittedly do via a bookmark or recent result, but this still adds at least two or three clicks which shouldn't be necessary). One other thing I noticed while thinking about distances in this context is that there is no scale bar on the map, so you can't even estimate graphically. I know it's not a big screen, but all in car navigation systems I have used have some nice compact scale bar, so I think this should be added in there too.

So anyway, that's the functionality rant, sorry about that :) !! Now for the data rant!

These issues are exacerbated by the fact that Google's point of interest data really seems to have a lot of issues. I mentioned some examples in yesterday's post, but categories of error that I have found in more than half of my test cases so far include incomplete addresses (either no street number, or no street), establishments which have closed, and incorrect categorization (examples below). I tested Google Maps online and it had the same errors (which is at least consistent - you would hope that they use the same data). For comparison, I went to try MapQuest (online) and it did MUCH better. Here are just a few example searches I tried, centered on 1792 Wynkoop St, Denver, CO:

• King Soopers (a local supermarket chain): in the top 10 on Google, there were three entries with an incomplete address (just Denver, CO), all of which show as being closer than the closest real King Soopers, and one entry which says in Google Maps online that it is an "unverified listing" (at 1150 Stout St) - but on the iPhone this just appears in the list without any indication that it is unverified (this one does not appear in MapQuest and I am pretty sure that it is not a real location). So 4 out of 10 results are wrong (non-existent), therefore you would have a 40% chance of ending up somewhere with no King Soopers. On MapQuest, 10 legitimate addresses are returned, though in some cases they appear to have multiple addresses for the same store (e.g. entry points on two different streets) - but this is not a serious error as you would still find a King Soopers.
  
• Tattered Cover (a well known Denver book store with 3 locations, which I mentioned in my post yesterday). MapQuest returns just 3 results, all correct. Google Maps online returns 8 entries in its initial list, of which two have incomplete addresses (duplicates of entries which do have complete addresses, but they show up at entirely different locations on the map), one is a store which closed a year ago, one says it is unverified and is in Boulder (where there is no Tattered Cover), and one is a duplicate of a correct store. The same 8 entries appear on the iPhone, again with no indication that the Boulder one is unverified - so in this case you have a 50% chance of not showing up at a Tattered Cover.
• Searches for Office Depot and Home Depot were more successful, with no obvious errors - hooray :) !!
• Searching for grocery in Google Maps online returned Market 41, a nightclub which closed a year ago, and four entries with incomplete addresses (two King Soopers which we saw before, and two Safeways). The iPhone returned a different list in this case, but included Market 41, two entries with incomplete addresses (one the same, one different), and Lemon Sisters market, which was a small grocery store but closed several years ago. So a 40% chance of going to the wrong place in this case. The same search on MapQuest did not return Market 41 and had 10 complete addresses, all of which looked legitimate.
  

So anyway, I won't belabor this. Maybe I'm just having really bad luck here. And because I live close to the center of Denver, I am picking up more of these incomplete addresses than some others might. And if you are aware that there is this sort of junk in the Google point of interest database, you can manually ignore results that don't have complete addresses (if you check their details) - but many users will not do that and will trust the pin that they see on the map. Hopefully the overall quality of the Google point of interest data is not as bad as in my random tests, but nevertheless I think that they will see significant pressure to clean this up as people use it a lot more, which should be the case as the iPhone (and other mobile systems) make it much easier for people to use this data on the go.

So anyway, to finish on a not entirely negative note, let's reiterate a few good things. Overall, the iPhone rocks! Google Maps on the iPhone has a lot of great features - the quality of the map display is great, panning and zooming using the touch screen is really fast and intuitive, routing works well and the way that it saves the full state of complex operations including routing and searches in "Recents" is really nice. BUT, the local search really doesn't match up to the high standards that we all expect from Google. Yes, it will give you what you want in many cases, but is missing key functionality like displaying and sorting by distance, common workflows like navigating to the point of interest you want to go are much more complex than they should be, and in my tests I have encountered way too many data errors to be comfortable relying on it. The good news is that fixing the functionality really shouldn't be difficult technically, though I think it will need Google to accept that sponsored results should be displayed separately somehow (as they are with regular Google search). Fixing the data problems may be a bigger effort, but others have done it as the MapQuest comparison shows.

Fixing local search on Google Maps for the iPhone is now top of my wish list, but I also still think that auto-correction of typing and rotation of the map are high priorities, as I mentioned yesterday. That's enough iPhone reviewing for this weekend I think :) !!

Review of Google Maps on the iPhone

Okay, so here it is, the review of Google Maps on the iPhone. As I said in my previous post giving general impressions of the iPhone, the maps look great and panning and zooming is very interactive and intuitive, but there are a number of little niggly details that counterbalance the cool parts leaving me somewhat neutral - impressed by some things, but overall left feeling that it could have been better (and this is aside from the obvious drawback of not having a GPS). So maybe "good but not as great as it could have been" is the overall verdict.



I did most of my testing using my WiFi connection, and then turned this off and used EDGE for a little while. Performance was excellent using the WiFi - it typically took around a second to download data for an uncached area, for either a street map or imagery, but up to two seconds or so occasionally, more so with imagery than street maps (which you would expect as the compressed images for street maps are typically smaller in size). The iPhone keeps a pretty good sized cache, and when data is cached display is pretty much instant, just as it is online. So overall the experience of panning and zooming around is very smooth and fast. Using EDGE instead of WiFi, I found that the download of data for an uncached area was generally taking around 3-4 seconds for street maps, and 5-7 seconds for imagery. But when data was cached, it was just as fast as with WiFi, as you would expect. So it was slower, but still fast enough to give a pretty good user experience, in my opinion. When zooming in or out, it animates the zoom using the data layer that is already there, so you see some sort of data while waiting for the data at the new scale to download.

The user interface for panning and zooming is intuitive once you learn the basics. Double tap to zoom in on a point (it doesn't center the point, but does keep that point on the screen - so if you double click on something in the northeast corner, after you zoom in it will still be in the northeast corner). Tapping with two fingers (at any distance apart and any orientation) will zoom out. You can also zoom in or out by "pinching" with two fingers and moving them closer together or further apart, which is a really intuitive interface which leverages the multi-touch capabilities.

One thing I really didn't like about the basic map display is that you can't rotate it. With other applications like the browser and photos, you just change the rotation of the iPhone from portrait to landscape, and the application automatically rotates the display (with a nice bit of animation). This is such a natural thing to want to do with a map display, I'm pretty disappointed that they didn't implement this - hopefully it will be there in a future release. This is one of multiple places where Google really didn't take advantage of some of the good features in other iPhone applications, and which makes for a less seamless and intuitive user experience as it doesn't do some things that you hope, and expect, it to do.

For the next set of observations, I took a pretty detailed set of photos which you can see here on flickr. Follow this through as a slide show to look at some search scenarios.


By and large, search worked pretty much as expected - you can type in a specific business name like "Tattered Cover" (my excellent local bookstore), or a generic term like "coffee", and get appropriate results back. But I did find a few things I hadn't anticipated, as follows:

• My search for the Tattered Cover yielded 3 incorrect locations, in addition to the (only) three correct ones. One was a location of an old store which closed a year ago, and two were the result of incomplete addresses for current stores (in addition to complete ones), one which just included the street with no number, and one which included the town but no street. I may have just been especially unfortunate with my choice of example, but this illustrates the importance of good and up to date data in any LBS application. An out of town visitor in the south side of Denver looking to visit the famous Tattered Cover bookstore could easily have driven to three locations, none of which had a Tattered Cover, by which point they would feel about Google Maps like I do about AT&T right now (see previous post)!
• Google Maps does not include the autocorrection feature for typing which is in all (or at least most) of the other iPhone applications. This is really bad. Typing is somewhat fiddly with the on screen keyboard, but you can go pretty fast if you have the autocorrect feature, and you get used to it in all the other applications. You have to type much more slowly and deliberately in Google Maps than anywhere else. This really needs fixing!
  
• When you search for items, it doesn't order them by distance from your location, neither does it show the distance to a search result in the list, which is very common in these type of applications and I think this is a serious omission too. On further investigation, I have come to the conclusion that the order in which results are returned is almost certainly determined by payment for higher placement - I found that the "Market" coffee store was consistently returned at the top of the list, and highlighted on the map, for a wide variety of different spatial queries in downtown Denver. This is not necessarily surprising - at some point Google needs to make some money back for all its investment in Google Maps and Earth, or it won't keep on investing - but it is good to know about. And if they remove the very useful function of showing how far away different search results are to hide the fact that they are (apparently) returning establishments which pay higher up the list, I'm not too happy about that. I will do a separate post about this as I think it's sufficiently interesting to highlight. You can see the detailed examples relating to this in the photo gallery.

One nice aspect of the search is that it searches your contacts (by name), so if you have someone's address in your contacts, it is very easy to find that and display that on a map or make it a start or end point for a route.

The real time traffic works well (I have the same thing on the BlackBerry also). Here are pictures showing central Denver, with and without traffic information, and you can see that the southbound carriageway of I-25 is currently congested.


The routing also seems to work well - in the picture gallery I show creation of a route from Denver to Vancouver, which was pretty much instantaneous, and you can list turn by turn directions either as text or on the map, and you can easily skip backwards and forwards in the turn list.

So general conclusion: I like the application, it's fast and intuitive in most regards, but does have a few things that need fixing. My order of priority on these would be:

• Needs to support autocorrection when typing
• Should be able to display search results in order of distance from the center of the screen (and show distances on the list) - even if this is an option, and the initial order is determined "at Google's discretion")
• The map display should rotate when you rotate the iPhone, as with other applications where this makes sense

And then of course there's that missing GPS, but that will have to wait a while longer, whereas hopefully they can make some of these software fixes sooner!

Latest on Google Maps on the iPhone

Apple released today a twenty minute video showing more details on the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone, so we can all "get ready" for the launch next Friday. They talk about the maps application about three quarters of the way through. They say "one of the most useful tools available on the Internet today is maps (sic), and Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing". It does have a number of flashy user interface features that aren't available on other versions of Google Maps. A few quick observations from the demo. You can zoom in by double tapping or "pinching" the map (dragging two fingers apart), dragging with one finger will pan, and tapping with two fingers will zoom out. Of course the multi-touch interface is one of the most hyped features of the iPhone, and has been popular on other recently announced devices too (such as Microsoft's touch table). You can search for businesses by location using a single search field - in the demo they just type in "san francisco sushi". Pins fly in from the top of the screen to show each location. You can dial a restaurant that you've found, or get a route and show live traffic information. Of course it supports both imagery and street map views.

I had been deliberating about whether to get an iPhone, but think I've been seduced and will have to get one, despite its lack of GPS. Fortunately I have a group plan on Cingular (now AT&T) so I think I should be able to just add one more line to that group relatively cheaply, and keep my BlackBerry 8800 too. So I guess I'll be in line at the Apple Store in Denver on Friday next week - they go on sale at 6pm and there is no pre-booking or buying online (yet).