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!

iPhone initial overview review

Well I'm sure that readers of this blog all want to know about the maps on the iPhone, but I thought I would start with a general overview of my initial reaction to the iPhone, and then I'll do a separate post shortly with more on the maps - though in one sentence 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). But more on that shortly.

So first impressions - the physical design is great, right down to all the small details like the packaging, as is typical with Apple products. Compared to my Blackberry 8800, it is about the same height but not as wide and not as deep - but it's quite a bit heavier, with a very nice, solid, quality feel in your hand. Small details like the way that you unlock the phone by sliding a virtual button across the screen feel surprisingly satisfying somehow. The general user experience is excellent on the whole, with a lot of nice innovations which you can see in the Apple videos, like the way that you can flip through photos just by dragging them with your finger, and rotating the device will rotate a photo accordingly. Typing feels a little clumsy at first, but there is a pretty good autocorrect feature which does a good job of figuring out if you hit the button next to the one you meant to press, and once you get used to that you can go quite a bit faster. But in general my BlackBerry wins on ability to type, which I would have expected. I'll do a test a little later and time some typing on both to quantify this. Now this may seem like nitpicking, but one thing I was quite disappointed in is that some of the "new and cool" user interface features are not implemented consistently across all applications, which is really rather disappointing given Apple's perfectionism about the user experience, and the fact that they have kept the iPhone a "closed system", and one of the main justifications for this was to ensure a seamless user experience. Maps is actually particularly guilty of not leveraging some user interface features it should have done, and I'll come back to that in my more detailed review shortly.

Initial setup was easy (apart from an incredibly bad experience with the AT&T non-help desk, which I won't go into details on now - but the short version is that my phone is on a family account, but my number was once a number on a business account, and you can't use an iPhone with a business account, and their system can't cope with this and wouldn't let it add the iPhone to my existing account so I had to create a new one ... they will be receiving some irate emails from me shortly!). But as far as the synchronization with my existing contacts, calendar, mail accounts and bookmarks on my Mac, that was all seamless via iTunes (with one slight glitch on my gmail which I fixed - won't go into the details, but if anyone reading this is having a problem receiving mail from a gmail account, email me and I'll send you the info). Copying over some photos, music and movies was a piece of cake too.

The screen quality is excellent, and especially nice for photos, videos and maps. The ability to zoom in and out on images or maps by "pinching" in or out with two fingers, and then pan around by dragging, is very intuitive and definitely one of the features I like. The web browsing experience is pretty good - rather than try to reformat web pages as most other mobile systems with small screens have done, Apple maintains the full formatting of the original web page and lets you zoom in and out easily to see details. With most web pages, looking at them in landscape mode the text is legible without having to zoom in (assuming you have decent eyesight!), though clicking on closely spaced links typically requires you to zoom in (which you can do by pinching or double tapping). So web browsing can be a bit fiddly at times, but in general it works very well once you get used to the user interface.

So far I have mainly been using the WiFi connection for my testing, with my fast Internet connection at home, and this has worked very well. I did a brief test with a YouTube video over EDGE rather than WiFi and the video size and quality was automatically reduced, but still acceptable - though not nearly as good as the YouTube video quality over WiFi, which is really excellent (it looks better than on my laptop). I have been very impressed with the YouTube support - though you only have access to a subset of videos at YouTube, there have been a few favorites of mine that I couldn't access (though this one, which is a particular favorite of mine at the moment, is available). I'm not sure how they determine what is available, or whether this will grow over time. I'll do more testing with EDGE on other applications in due course.

Oh yes, I believe it's a phone too :) !! So far no problems on that front - though in a quick test of the speaker phone, the speaker didn't seem very loud.

So in overall summary, a thumbs up from me - lots of cool features and interesting user interface innovations. But a number of niggly details which could have been better on the usability, and especially on the maps - and that's aside from the obvious missing features like GPS, no 3G network, etc (which have been covered extensively elsewhere). Maps review coming soon, I promise!

iPhone first impressions

So here's a quick post on first impressions which I'm writing in the browser on the iPhone, just because it seems like I should :)! Will do a more detailed review tomorrow, but first impressions are generally good with a few caveats - definitely a very cool feel to it overall. Video and photos are two of the most impressive things. The mapping capability is nice but not as functional as my BlackBerry 8800, as expected.

Waiting in the iPhone line

Well Glenn is pretty down on the iPhone, while Ed says he would be in the line if he was in the US. Well, I'm in the line in Denver ... decided to go to the Cingular store walking distance from my home rather than the Apple Store in Cherry Creek, which might be more fun but I'm sure will be much more crowded. There are about 35 people in the line in front of me (I got here around 4pm for the 6pm opening), and the rumor is that they have 120 to sell here, and you can only buy 1 per person (2 per person at Apple stores) - so I should be in good shape to be posting a review later.

Here I am writing this post on my MacBook (which I only bought a few weeks ago, but I have become quite an Apple fan boy since then). As I posted previously, I'm disappointed that the iPhone doesn't have a GPS, but I think it does have a lot of cool features and some very interesting user interface innovations, which is enough justification for me to get one (though I will keep my BlackBerry 8800 also).

The "dark side" poll - neck and neck!

Well, after my previous post where I reported that the rebel forces had pulled ahead, the Empire did indeed regroup and pulled ahead slightly today, but at the time of writing the two sides of the Force are locked in a deadly embrace - 119 votes for the dark side and 119 votes against, with 28 don't knows.
Thanks also to the various people who have emailed me with advice! I should point out by the way, to allay the concerns of some correspondents, that I am exploring a lot of possibilities right now. I am definitely interested in the "neogeography" space and what Google, Microsoft, Yahoo et al are doing there, and there could be opportunities either with the big guys themselves, existing startups leveraging their technology, or in doing my own startup. There are also interesting opportunities in the open source arena. And last and perhaps least (but not necessarily!), there are opportunities with the more established geospatial companies.

So the topic of this poll is really more along the lines of should "going to the dark side" be one of the options that gets into my shortlist for serious consideration? But thanks for all the votes, the poll is on my main blog page if you haven't voted yet and would like to!

Thoughts on GE's next generation system based on Oracle - part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post about GE (General Electric)'s next generation system based on Oracle - please read that before reading this if you haven't already done so. At the end of part 1, I said that in part 2 I would talk about the real reason why this product could be a significant jump forward for the utility industry, which really hasn't been highlighted in the GE announcements or in any of the commentary I've seen - and also why this same factor could be the reason that the product fails. And last but not least, I'll talk about some of the challenges which GE faces in positioning the new product with regard to the existing Smallworld products. So here we go ...

I think that the factor that could make this product a significant jump forward is that, as I understand it from contacts at GE, they are really trying to produce something that is an off the shelf product which can be configured rather than customized (the distinction being that configuration just involves setting certain parameters about how the application behaves, as opposed to customization which involves writing code). Now GE really didn't talk about this in their announcement, and this information comes from informal conversations, so it's possible this emphasis may not be as strong as I had inferred - but either way it is interesting to talk about the pros and cons of this approach.

Historically in the utility industry, the implementation of geospatial systems has involved buying a software product as a starting point (with GE, Intergraph and ESRI being the three primary vendors in the space), and then doing some customization (data modeling, further software development, etc) on top of that core product to meet each individual utility's specific requirements. This approach enables each utility to get a system which closely meets its specific requirements, but has drawbacks: apart from the additional cost for the initial customization, having many different custom systems makes support and upgrade procedures harder for vendor and user alike. All the major vendors have generally had a "starter system" or "template" for the customization, which reduces the cost of the initial implementation, but in general (in my experience) has not really helped in terms of simplifying ongoing support and upgrade issues, and thereby reducing ongoing cost of ownership. In the early 2000s, when Intergraph launched its G/Technology product, initially the intent was that it would be a completely off the shelf system, allowing some configuration but not customization. While many utilities liked the principle, nearly all wanted additional functionality in their systems (and of course typically different utilities wanted different additional functionality). So Intergraph ended up having to rearchitect their initial approach to allow the system to be customized in a more flexible way, which was not a trivial undertaking and probably cost them a few years in terms of getting a competitive version of G/Technology to market.

So it will be interesting to see if GE really does pursue the angle that this will be an "off the shelf solution". It is hard to be wishy-washy about this - if you say that you think it will meet many customer needs off the shelf but you can still customize it if you want, then you really don't address the ongoing cost of ownership issues associated with the complexity of supporting and upgrading all these different systems in the field (unless you put very strict constraints on the customization, and really constrain yourself to not modify APIs from one release to the next). If GE does take a truly off the shelf approach then this would differentiate the product in the market IF it was functionally rich enough - but the risk if the product is not functionally rich enough is that you won't be able to win business and it will set back your entry to the market until either you allow customization (which makes you less differentiated) or you add sufficient functionality that you can be competitive - either of which may take a significant amount of time.

This leads on to the challenges that GE faces in terms of positioning the new product versus the current Smallworld product. Now GE is specifically trying not to position this as a replacement for Smallworld, and is saying that it will continue to develop new functionality on both platforms. It's fine to say that, but obviously the challenge with this approach is that if you develop all functionality on two different platforms which don't support common code, you can only develop half as much new functionality with the same number of developers (well maybe a bit more than half as much, since some design work could be common across both platforms, but certainly you can do a lot less than you could do if you just focused on a single platform). So that really doesn't seem like a sustainable approach for a long period of time, unless GE is prepared to substantially increase the size of its development team, which I imagine would be hard for it to justify. GE is initially focusing the new product specifically on North American mid-size electric utilities, so migrating to the new product will not be an option yet for customers who do not fall into that category, which is a fairly large majority.

For those customers who are in a position to consider migration (the North American mid-size electric utilities - and presumably the segments addressed will expand over time), GE will face the classic challenges of any company going through a major technology upgrade (and which Intergraph went through - and is still going through - with the migration from its older FRAMME product to G/Technology, and ESRI from Arc/Info 7 to ArcGIS). One challenge is that with a product like Smallworld that is 16 years old and exceptionally customizable, most customers have very rich functionality which it is hard to replace with a product that has only been under development for a year or two. There will either be custom development necessary to replace custom functionality in the old system, or the customer will need to be persuaded to give up some existing functionality to get other benefits that can be obtained from the new architecture. This generally means that the migration from the old system to the new system is a large enough project that most organizations will take the opportunity to evaluate other systems on the market and decide whether to stay with the same vendor or switch to a new one. There has been little turnover in the utility market in recent years, so on the rare occasions that utilities do choose a new system, all the vendors are very hungry for those opportunities and pricing tends to be very competitive, especially since the three major systems are not highly differentiated these days. As I said, none of this part is unique to GE, it is the same situation that ESRI and Intergraph have gone through as they have been migrating their customers to newer technologies.

One other challenge GE may have is with the customers who are not yet addressed by the new product. It will presumably take several years before the new product is an option for all of them (I believe that GE is saying that they will have a beta out sometime this year, then a first release first half of next year, and unless it's different from all other software products it will probably need a second release before it's really ready for serious use, so suppose that arrives late 2008 or early 2009, then probably the product is not going to be expanding to substantial additional market segments until 2009 or 2010). Now by and large I think that the Smallworld customer base is still pretty happy, so maybe customers will be willing to continue, assuming that GE continues to invest in Smallworld as it says it will. But there is also the risk that some customers will decide that this all means that the writing is on the wall for the Smallworld products, even if they keep going for a few more years, so maybe they should just go out and look at Intergraph and ESRI, who are running on more mainstream architectures which are in production today.

One other challenge for GE as they try to address moving their larger customers to the new platform at some point in the future (assuming they do) will be how to provide the same level of scalability that Smallworld VMDS does - perhaps that's a topic for a future discussion.

So anyway, it will be interesting to see how all this pans out over the next few years. I wish the GE guys good luck with it - as I said before, the industry can use additional innovation and competition!

Quick update on my "going to the dark side" poll

Wow, since I posted last night that the voting in my pollmappr poll was significantly in favor of me going to the dark side (42 for, 25 against, 11 don't know), the rebel forces have mobilized and have now moved into the lead - the current count is 70 for, 77 against, 17 don't know. So a resounding 45 votes against versus 28 for the dark side since last night. Will the Empire strike back? We'll see :) !!