Navigating through China, part 2: Assess your resourses.

If you have an iPhone, you know that it comes with Maps.app pre-installed. So why on earth would anyone need anything else? Well, life is hard and Maps.app has its shortcomings, and severe ones.

But first of all, let's take a look at the features of built-in maps, shall we?

First of all, the Maps.app is merely a client for Google Maps. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? Well, see for yourself.

First of my requirements: "Up-to date and accurate street map, including maps of Ningbo and surrounding area". There are maybe some omissions in Google maps, but up until now I found none, so this test was passed easily. You get street names in local language, which is a must here (apparently Google checks your IP to decide on the display language, but that's OK as long as I'm not in Thailand or Korea). Satellite maps are quite decent, too.

But then came the second one: "Accurate positioning". This was one that Google fails constantly. It looks like coordinates are off 200~500 meters in random direction. Now, there's an app for that in the iTunes store (China Map Fix for $2.99) but I can't be persuaded to try it, as it would address only one of the Maps.app's shortcomings (more on this below).

The third one was almost as important as accurate positioning: Favorites. I have to go to many factories every month, sometimes the driver would know the address, but often they'd only know vaguely where the place is and I have to call our destination so they would give directions to he driver... and there's 75% chance that we'll get lost anyway. Now, Google maps is quite good at it, but the route may be a little quirky (or too quirky – see this link or this one for an example). As a bonus, looks like it does Google search on whatever you have entered in the search field so it can help when you do not have Chinese name for the factory.

The huge drawback of Maps.app is the lack of dynamic routing, when the route is re-calculated periodically as you position changes. It helps enormously when you see the shortcut and take it. With Google maps you have to manually refresh the route – which takes some time, and during that time you can miss that turn and have to refresh the directions again...

When it comes to map search, Maps.app is quite decent. The problem is, sometimes results are a bit off, and you may end up at the other end of the city, so better check the results if you can. Also it looks sometime like it saves the street address instead of coordinates, but it may be just the result of that error in positioning.

After extensive testing and usage (I had that phone for a year now) I came to the following conclusion: Maps.app is not what I need most of the time (problems with positioning, no dynamic routes...), but sometimes (like when you need to check the bus route) it's indispensable. And as it comes with the phone anyway, I'll continue to use it, but mostly for bus routes and the like.