iPhone iPractice: The Maps Application — Find Places!
This post is the first one from a series I’m calling “iPhone iPractice”, short for “iPhone In Practice”. I’m going to share some tips and provide an insight into the parts of the iPhone I find useful. This time I’m going to focus on the Maps application.
Everytime that I watched an iPhone ad in the past, I saw the Maps icon and thought by myself “This application is most likely one of the not-so-useful ones for me, since there’s no GPS and I know the places I need to go to here in Würzburg”.
I figured I won’t need the Maps application unless I visited another city. Wrong.
The picture above (yeah, I need to get a better camera again) shows my iPhone with a part of Würzburg on it. The red pin marks a street a friend needed to go to today — we didn’t know where it was, so we consulted my iPhone. Tadaaaa! There it is.
Another friend had a sore throat for a few days and wanted to take medical advice after her classes had finished today — with my iPhone’s help we found many general practitioners near the school within 30 seconds and she could choose one. Great, problem solved!
Those were two example situations that happened to me today — without the iPhone my answer to both of them had turned out to be more like “Dunno.”.
So the Maps application is great for finding places today — what is it going to do in the future?
In my opinion the iPhone unfortunately lacks GPS at the moment — this would make the Maps application a full-blown navigational system. The current Routes feature could do with an upgrade like that.
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I think I’m going to cry if I see another cool iPhone feature or app’.
I do hope they come to Japan soon.
Interestingly, just about every Japanese phone has a navigation system that updates in real-time (no satellite imagery though).
The variety of mobile phones with full-blown navigation systems is not very big in Germany and most of them don’t have GPS built-in (they use external receivers so they get a better signal but you can’t use them outside the car).
I like Google Maps optional satellite imagery, but I don’t understand why AppleGoo didn’t implement the hybrid view on the iPhone — so far you can only choose between “Map” and “Satellite”.
PS: You haven’t been sleeping for only one and a half hour, have you? What about bedtime?
Hey. I was looking for iPhone connection in europe and found your page. Have you succeeded to connect it to somebody beside of tMobile? Vodaphone for example?
Cause I’d like to buy it but don’t sure if i’ll be able to use it on vodaphone.
Hi,
I had a T-Mobile prepaid contract before I got the iPhone. When I put the old SIM into the iPhone, it said “Insert a valid SIM”.
I didn’t try any other carriers cards — I have my T-Mobile contract
If you want to use the iPhone with another carrier in Europe you have to get the more expensive unlocked version (999€ in German T-Mobile Shops or around 750€ with Orange in France).
Julian
Now that they’ve added Google Street View, it’s the coolest thing ever. I can “drive” there on my iPhone even before stepping outside the door so I know exactly what the parking situation is going to be. I love my iPhone haha.