This is a continuing series of posts covering my two-month usage and impressions of the iPhone. My last review covered the YouTube and Stocks applications. This installment will review the last two applications on the second row, the Maps and Weather applications.
Maps: All-in-all, Google and Apple have done a great job collaborating on the Maps application. In a short summary, Maps is easy to use and is very good at getting the information you want back to the user in a form that can be useful. That is, enter a name, a city, and a state, and Maps will place a pin at every location that meets the criteria. Does it make mistakes? Yes, on occasion it will get confused. But for the most part, the information is reliable.
Maps will pull up countries, cities, states, roads, addresses, and business names in a general area. For frequent repeat searches, you can bookmark the information. This is useful when there are locations that you frequently use as starting or ending point on a trip.
Particularly nice touches are the routing button and the traffic button. The button in the bottom left of the screen expands the search area allowing the user to use the previous search result as a starting point or a destination (the button to the left of the search entry allows you to switch destination and start--another nice touch). Add to this feature the fact that you can "bookmark" frequently used locations which makes entry much faster. For example, I have bookmarked both my home address and my business address because these are frequent starting points. If I am generating directions and want the reverse route, I can press the button to the left of the entry area again and the application will reverse the start and end locations and the associated turn-by-turn directions. This is stuff I actually use!
The traffic button in the bottom right of the screen toggles an overlay of traffic conditions onto the displayed map. Outside of large metropolitan areas, this information can be sparse, but where it is available, it has proven to be a great help.
The map can be shown in three different views: Maps showing street maps of locations requested; satellite views which honestly I use primarily to impress my friends (but very useful when hiking); and the list view which is great when you need to follow turn-by-turn directions.
Maps is lightening fast using WiFi and provides decent response on EDGE. Again, as mentioned in previous application reviews, Apple needs to enable the ability to rotate the screen for viewing in landscape mode.
Weather: The weather application is a nice, east-to-set up, and easy-to-use feature. By entering a zip code or a city and state, the application will return a 7-day forecast giving general weather conditions (via weather icons such a sunny, partly cloudy, rain, etc.), high and low temperature, and the current temperature. The application allows tracking of multiple locations (how many, I'm not sure, but I currently track six locations.
Once again, my critique is with Yahoo! Not the application. If you would like more weather information, you can touch the "Y!" button in the bottom left corner. The problem is when the Web screen displays, it is once again the crappy mobile Yahoo! site used for the stocks application. The weather information on this site is actually less than that contained in the iPhone application! The remainder of information on the site is location-based, not weather-based. My recommendation to Apple and Yahoo! is to provide detailed weather information when "Y!" is touched. The most obvious missing element is radar. As a result, I have had to search the Internet for weather radar sites and bookmark them in Safari. They are more difficult to get to, but they are much more informative. As a result, I find little use for the "Y!" button.
I will be publishing my thoughts on the third row applications in the near future. In the meantime, if you have comments or suggestions for Apple, please let me know.
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