[MOD NOTE]
Lets leave the political discussions out of this thread.
This time I actually agree with Mod. Wow that's a first for me! I had this huge political rant ready to go, thought better of it, and deleted it. Then I read Mod's note - Good Call!
That being said, I am SO EXCITED to have NavTeq maps on my phone again soon. They're a fantastic, independent alternative to Apple/TomTom/TeleNav and Google.
I think Google started from NavTeq but branched off and does their own thing now.
Garmin uses NavTeq data but I haven't felt like ponying up the $50 or so for them as I never really liked the interface, and already purchased TomTom and CoPilot.
This is a great great day for GPS fans everywhere!
So now all of the GPS map data sets can be on my phone:
1. TeleNav
2. Navteq
3. OpenStreetMap
4. Google.
Of those 4, now I can have full offline data sets for 1-3, which is invaluable in fringy Western areas of the US. Maybe someday Google will have a downloadable data set too.
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The single biggest issue I have with Apple Maps is its inability to find around one in three addresses that I search for (typically copied directly from mails by people I have to meet).
Google Maps on the other hand, finds every single one of them. And when using navigation the voice of Google Maps is also better. So glad, Google decided to step up their game on iOS.
Google Maps is freakingly mindblowingly astonishing to me. I can't believe how good it is. Aside from the creepiness aspect, I just love how it even listens to my voicemails (google voice) and just knows where I want to go based on the voicemail, or email, or what I was searching for in Chrome, etc.
Always needing a data connection to start out though, sucks.
Refusing to add "night mode" just because it's running on an iPhone is plain bad form as well.
Such political kindergartener behavior is not becoming of a megacorp.
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You can do that in a limited fashion with Google Maps.
It hardly ever works right. Even after years of them working on it. They just need to come up with a good subset of 2-4 self contained Gigs and let us put the whole damn thing on our phone. If they want to track us so bad they can just store the tracking data on the phone temporarily and upload it to their servers whenever we hit a good data connection.
