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IOS Maps and China

anthonydrendel.com

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Re: IOS Maps and China

#31

Post by michelleclsun »

fpgeek wrote: post #30

Yes, China is going to pass the US as the world's largest smartphone market. And if Apple's maps genuinely are better than Google's in China (something people are arguing about in this thread), that's to their credit. That being said, it is important to put this in perspective. While the overall Chinese smartphone market will soon be larger than the US smartphone market, the portion currently addressable by Apple (pe…

I am a Hong Kong native and lived in Beijing, and traveled for work in Shenzhen and Shanghai extensively. I agree that the population that can afford an iphone in China is still a small portion. However, I believe a cheaper iPhone with TD-SCDMA may not be a viable solution for Apple to the Chinese market for two reasons.

a) The amount of craze and worship to Apple products in key cities surpasses any reasonable level. People are willing to pay, a mark up of 58% - 98% markup in the grey market in Shenzhen. In fact, there are businesses in Hong Kong that built around hiring cheap labor to line up in Apple Store and carrying the iPhones across the border for a quick turnaround of arbitraging prices. [1]

It took little more than five hours for the first Apple iPhone 5s to go on sale in China after being smuggled across the border from Hong Kong, but supplies were short and prices high.

For anyone able to secure one, the new phone cost HK$5,588 ($720), or the equivalent of around 4,545 yuan, at the Hong Kong Apple store, while they were selling for between 7,500 yuan [$1140] and 9,000 yuan [$1427] in the litter-strewn building in Shenzhen where fake and smuggled phones are often hawked. [2]

b) It is always been Apple's strategy to price high and capture a customer segment with high willingness to pay. The app store revenue has significantly higher share of revenue for fewer app downloads versus android. "..the App Store leads with a revenue share of 71% (compared to 29% for Android) even though total downloads through Google Play accounts for 35% of the total, versus 28% for iOS. * [3]

[1] http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/09/smuggled...

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/21/iphone-5-in-china_n...

[3] http://www.imore.com/ios-app-store-generates-double-google-p...

Re: IOS Maps and China

#32

Post by bmeckel »

jeremymims wrote: post #11

Meanwhile, searching for a Broadway address a few blocks away from the Manhattan Apple Store in SoHo led to directions to Broadway in Brooklyn, NY. I've used Apple products since 1993 (Centris 610) and even owned a Powerbook G3 trapped on ADB and a G4 Cube. I've put up with all sorts of weirdness from Apple over the years. The point of technology is to help you do your job better. I saw my future of late meetings, ge…

I've been dealing with this for months, and tried to let people know the upgrade wasn't worth it. I figured if I kept some people from it I'd have done some good. Everyone shrugged me off. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've ended up in different states and even different countries because maps search is such shit. I even held out, hoping it would get better by release, as it is their first maps product, so give them some time to work out the flaws. Not any more, I'm incredibly upset I didn't downgrade before they stopped signing 5, and am stuck with this junk for the time being. Hopefully apple pushes the google maps app through so we can forget about this ordeal.

Re: IOS Maps and China

#33

Post by bad_user »

ricardobeat wrote: post #28
jeremymims wrote: post #11

Meanwhile, searching for a Broadway address a few blocks away from the Manhattan Apple Store in SoHo led to directions to Broadway in Brooklyn, NY. I've used Apple products since 1993 (Centris 610) and even owned a Powerbook G3 trapped on ADB and a G4 Cube. I've put up with all sorts of weirdness from Apple over the years. The point of technology is to help you do your job better. I saw my future of late meetings, ge…

A shame, that phone can run the Google Maps webapp pretty well. I'm getting the feeling that most problems with the new Maps come from it's subpar recommendation/auto-correct engine, which (unsurprisingly) is great in Google maps. It gets thing right if you type exact, complete addresses, but can fail miserably on basic queries.

It's difficult to operate the Google Maps website on the small screen of a phone. On the other hand, it works well on an iPad. After I installed iOS 6, I added a shortcut to Google Maps on the desktop. Works great.

Re: IOS Maps and China

#34

Post by codeka »

spitx wrote: post #14

>"I'm talking about those of us who live in China (you know, the place with 1.3+ billion people and the second-largest economy in the world)." This claim is preposterous. There are 1.241 billion in India and Hindi is not even supported in the ios6. http://i.cubeupload.com/kTSpGM.jpg As others have pointed out, the granularity on Google Maps is not one bit poorer. http://i.cubeupload.com/3Dj8kk.jpg Google seems to be…

Google also lets you see the Chinese names (at least, in the web interface of Maps, you just uncheck "English" in the settings drop-down).

Re: IOS Maps and China

#35

Post by snogglethorpe »

kalleboo wrote: post #21

If I zoom in one more step than he did on Google Maps, I see the same POIs as on his Apple map. And the copyright on maps.google.com is... "AutoNavi", the same provider he praises. I agree that Apple have done a better presentation here by showing more data at a further zoom level. It's the exact opposite of my experience of Apple Maps here in Japan - I have to zoom in to absurd levels just to see train tracks (which…

Even Google maps in Japan way overemphasizes highways and other roads, given that they're less important than transit in places like Tokyo.

You can tone down some of road-overemphasis by selecting the transit option (路線図) in the side-menu, but this really should be turned on by default in Japan. [Using this option is also a little annoying because it highlights subway lines in rather garish colors, while (equally important) surface rail lines keep their ordinary subdued appearance.]

I dunno why they do things this way, but I suppose a lot of the tech and know-how came from the car-obsessed U.S., and probably a lot of their Japanese data comes from road-atlas companies (who have a reason to emphasize roads).

Re: IOS Maps and China

#36

Post by cormullion »

bmeckel wrote: post #32
jeremymims wrote: post #11

Meanwhile, searching for a Broadway address a few blocks away from the Manhattan Apple Store in SoHo led to directions to Broadway in Brooklyn, NY. I've used Apple products since 1993 (Centris 610) and even owned a Powerbook G3 trapped on ADB and a G4 Cube. I've put up with all sorts of weirdness from Apple over the years. The point of technology is to help you do your job better. I saw my future of late meetings, ge…

I've been dealing with this for months, and tried to let people know the upgrade wasn't worth it. I figured if I kept some people from it I'd have done some good. Everyone shrugged me off. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've ended up in different states and even different countries because maps search is such shit. I even held out, hoping it would get better by release, as it is their first maps produc…

> I can't even begin to tell you how many times I've ended up in [...] different countries because maps search is such shit.

Could you give us an example or two? I'm fascinated to know how such a thing would happen. Perhaps it was in Europe - the countries are terribly close together...

Re: IOS Maps and China

#37

Post by liotier »

spitx wrote: post #14

>"I'm talking about those of us who live in China (you know, the place with 1.3+ billion people and the second-largest economy in the world)." This claim is preposterous. There are 1.241 billion in India and Hindi is not even supported in the ios6. http://i.cubeupload.com/kTSpGM.jpg As others have pointed out, the granularity on Google Maps is not one bit poorer. http://i.cubeupload.com/3Dj8kk.jpg Google seems to be…

  > There are 1.241 billion in India and
  > Hindi is not even supported in the ios6.
Only one third of the people of India speak Hindi. That's still 400 million people, but India's highly multilingual environment makes localization choices more complicated.

Re: IOS Maps and China

#38

Post by snogglethorpe »

harisenbon wrote: post #24
kalleboo wrote: post #21

If I zoom in one more step than he did on Google Maps, I see the same POIs as on his Apple map. And the copyright on maps.google.com is... "AutoNavi", the same provider he praises. I agree that Apple have done a better presentation here by showing more data at a further zoom level. It's the exact opposite of my experience of Apple Maps here in Japan - I have to zoom in to absurd levels just to see train tracks (which…

(Japan) My wife had updated her iPhone to iOS6 and we were using it to go to the next city over. Not only are the stations, trainlines and street names not listed unless you zoom in right on top of them, there are no traffic signals or intersection names. The font that they chose for the area names is also incredibly wide, which works well for something like "Brooklyn" but not for a name as long as "KakamigaharaHonma…

> Everyone I've talked to in Japan who has upgraded regrets it.

... and yesterday I saw a rather long prime-time Japanese TV news piece about how screwed up Apple's iOS6 maps are, where the reporter was travelling around to various places in Tokyo and showing how crazily Apple maps misrepresented them...

So the story's clearly made the jump from something techies know about to general news, just when all the resellers are trying hard to get people excited about the iphone 5...

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