My god, the Sea World San Diego directions ARE off. That would have been terrible for me a few weeks ago when I went there. Getting lost on big roads and complex cities is confusing and possibly dangerous. I can't believe they fucked up the simple task of directing someone to a location such as Sea World.

Can we download the old maps application we used to have, or are we stuck with this new one? I don't even feel comfortable using my phone to help me find directions if I can't be sure it knows where it's telling me to go. That could be disastrous.

I don't get it. In one paragraph you speculate that Google's maps app could get rejected, then in the second you note that there are already maps alternatives on the App Store. Apple would have to throw out dozens, maybe hundreds of maps apps to justify rejecting Google's.

As for Google's map integration with Android, it may be deletable or replaceable, but it has numerous features which have never been present on any other platform, including the web. Would Android's voice commands, APIs and other features really plug into a third-party maps app on an Android device as well as they do with Google's own?

You can revert to iOS 5 if you have a good backup.

Less hassle might be to use a third party app (Waze is a pretty popular free option, and there are tons of other free and paid apps to check out), or to visit maps.google.com in Safari. Google's web app won't have street view like the old maps app or turn-by-turn like the new one, or be as elegant to use as either, but it will be using the same data as the old Maps app.

Yes. Google's voice integration works with any app. Its effectively voice text entry. Its the reason why if I say "play Micheal Jackson", I'll get prompted to use Google's Music, Youtube, CM10 Music player, GrooveShark, or Pandora. Then I can set one of these as a default if I wanted.

Anytime you open anything that uses text entry, you have a voice option. Additionally, you can launch anything via voice as well.

Of course this really becomes useful with Android 4 (ICS) and 4.1 (JB). Pre-these it was only text-entry for the most part and no real 3rd party integration. JB really makes it on par with Siri in functionality along with a better sounding voice.

I keep hearing mixed reviews of JB's voice operation versus Siri (but in all reviews, they're close). Some say JB doesn't understand dialects as well as Siri and doesn't handle slang words as well as Apple's service. Others say that Siri is slower and that its voice is more uneven.

Meh. I don't know what to believe at this point. I've used Siri quite a bit and it's pretty good. Understands me close to 100% of the time, though it's a little slower than I'd like.

All in all, I hope Apple and Google continue to push each other in this market. I think it's the future of mobile computing... Not useful in all situations, but extremely useful in some (such as driving).

The major downside I see right now is that JB just isn't being delivered to enough devices. It only has something like 2% of the Android market right now. Google promised that this would change soon but I'm not seeing much in the way of results yet.

I'll admit, I'm quite surprised. I've always been told that tight Google Everything integration was a big feature of Android, but it seems they missed out on Maps.

So if you have an app that (for example) points to a location on a map inside the app, is there no Android API for that and the app dev is on his/her own? Or does the API somehow pass the request to whichever map you have set as default?

Edit: Oh yeah, and now Google is saying they are making a maps app for iOS:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/google-may-have-an-ios-mapping-app-in-the-works-after-all/

I guess we'll see whether they plan on developing features on par with the Android version or if they're just going to put a graceful UI around their web app.

The navigation was difficult to deal with, I prefer the step by step thing that google used, but I'm sure I'll come to enjoy Apple's version.

The Google integration for all its services really comes down to your personalization, usage, and history; not OS forced defaults. Two vastly different featuresets. Google integration among services simply makes life easier to say email a document you have in your Drive account, or share a song via Google+ with a circle, or searching on YouTube that takes into account your search history on Google.

If you have a map location in say the browser or email or sms/mms, the phone will prompt you to open one of your potentially many maps applications. Granted if you only have Google Maps, it opens that, or if you've set one to be the default it will open that one. But, you have the choice to define it to best fit your needs.

Android is all about flexibility and allowing you to create the experience you want.

They are close to each other now. I'd still say Siri is better and general human natural speech and Google is better and finding the right stuff quickly. With JB the results are also better looking... something iOS6 started to copy.

I know Google has very good learning features, so regardless of your speech patterns, the more you use it the more precise it becomes. For me using it for a few years now, its nearly 100% for anything I say or ask. Additionally, if you've ever played with Google Translate, you'll realize it is very good at handling a great number of languages and their dialects. But if you have a very heavy accent of one language and you're speaking another, it will get tripped up more often.

Of course Android's biggest complaint is always its slower distribution of the latest updates. If a phone launched with ICS or later, that is greatly rectified as the OEM has only a few months to get it up vs over a year previously. So, its an improvement, but it will never match Apple due to the simple fact that there are FAR more players/devices in the field. But, that is why I always argue to buy Nexus.

Ah, so there is no maps API for Android. Developers can either pass location data to another app or work something out on their own. Interesting.