I don't get how people praises so much the iOS app store. I own an iPad and it's always a chore to find any decent free app. Also lots of paid apps are crappy, and you don't have any refund method. My android phone is filled with free and high quality free apps.

I have a Nexus 7 and the Android tablet apps are terrible. In three months I haven't found a singe must buy app that I would recommend to anyone.

I do have an iPhone, but do not have an iPad to compare tablet to table.

> New Maps definitely a step down from Google Maps

I'm tired of this meme. It's grounded in truth as the best memes are, but otherwise mostly it's "much ado" by we technorati, doting on SF and NYC public transportation and using "Google" Maps like a paper map to see what's nearby (campus, neighborhood, etc), and thinking everyone's use case mirrors theirs. It's easy to join this chorus. It's harder to voice disagreement by pointing out the huge usability strides in Apple Maps vs the earlier app. You will be mocked. But...

In most of America, cell coverage is sporadic and slow. Try to pull up where you are on former maps app and you wait ages for tiles to come in. Zoom, wait ages again. Drive or hike in marginal coverage with Apple Maps and the difference is night and day -- Apple Maps seems almost like it is in offline mode. Stats and tests prove it uses a fraction of the data, and holds far more of your map in memory.

In most of America, getting from A to B needs a car. The "Google" Maps didn't do real time turn by turn, much less offer the spoken guidance, glancable visual guidance (and status bar guidance while in other apps) of Apple Maps.

In the rest of the world, the famous public transportation options of Google Maps weren't necessarily available. In Rome, for example, a public transportation search simply returns no public transportation found. Apple opened transit up to local providers, and now cities worldwide are already offering local-grown transit apps that hook in. In this country, professional guidance companies like Navigon have already hooked in with "urban guidance" that can blend car to get into city, walking to get from parking to public transportation, and transit to get around town, in a single route.

Blogs show screens of Apple's 3D view mapping satellite onto 3D models poorly. So it's not Google Earth. For everyman's workaday use, so what? Articles joke about addresses being in BFE instead of downtown. Google Maps does that too, more times than not, unless you're careful to give enough precision in the search terms, and even then it will prefer Queens or Brooklyn to Manhattan for similarly numbered streets in "New York, NY". You have to use "Manhattan" to get the street 2 blocks away.

There's a report issue button, and as users use Apple Maps, the glitches will improve. In the meantime, what's amazing is how much more usable the foundation and architecture of the app and server side data is compared to the old app. This is not a step down, it's a huge step forward that can be readily built upon, and the launch day quirks (that can be found in any mapping app when you know your own area within a data set that covers the planet) simply do not get in the way of the typical user's everyday use.

I'm a mapping hobbyist. Google Maps have gotten almost as good as hand made paper maps from the past, but still have a long way to go to get to the level of a Richard Saul Wurman. Apple Maps already have map usability techniques that offer clearer info with less clutter, and in the months of using the beta test app I rarely had complaints in the greater NYC area other than transit, which has now been even better solved by the whole new class of beautiful and usable third party transit apps. Yet technorati have scared regular users from upgrading for fear of "losing" their Google Maps. That's a huge disservice to the normals who count on us for guidance. (And of course they can add Google Maps back to their home screen. It only works online anyway, why aren't we telling people how to have both?)

Apple upgraded Maps to offer guidance to regular people in flyover country. Of course Apple should be held to task for insufficient debugging of place points, but even aside from the other fantastic features of iOS 6 (eg shared photostreams), friends and family just wanting to drive to work on the best route to avoid traffic should be encouraged upgrade today.

Apple maps doesn't have 3D or turn by turn for me. That's because Apple decided go the planned obsolecence route and withhold those features from iPhone 4 owners. So now I have all the downsides of the new maps wih none of he benefits.

With Apple, there's usually a usability reason for these decisions. When you get to update, but certain features aren't enabled, I'm not sure that's planned obsolecense. Not releasing ICS for phones launched last year is, but in this iPhone 4 vs 4S situation, looking at what iOS 6 features you do get vs which you don't, there's a common thread that points to something else.

On your device you get iOS 6, but 3D turn by turn NAV is designed to run in parallel (multitasking) with other apps like Mail or Messages. Consider the performance gain of the iPhone 4S vs the iPhone 4 (nearly 2x, see below), and consider how users would react if the background turn by turn nav was causing their foreground apps to freeze.

A hallmark of the iPhone experience is fluidity. It's one of the painfully obvious differences to owners of both OSs (I own a Google Nexus as well). Framerate and responsiveness make the UI feel more tactile and real, connected to your touch and intentions. My speculation is that the processing power needed for the turn by turn could degrade the experience while in other apps, so it was nixed.

Forgot the 4S vs 4 performance link: http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/10/11/iphone-4s-vs-android...