Apple was left red-faced today after the much-hyped Maps application bundled with iOS 6 turned up some embarrassingly inaccurate entries. A quick search of South Dublin soon turned up a new airport for the capital in Airfield Park, a 35-acre estate with a farm, gardens and a cafe in Kilmacud.
Other errors spotted by eagle-eyed users include the repositioning of Dublin Zoo to Temple Bar, London losing Paddington Station, Chicago’s Sears Tower being incorrectly identified and the Indian Ocean being transported to Greenland.
The data Apple relies upon for Maps comes from GPS device makers TomTom, but a statement from the company emphasised its role merely as an information provider, with no input into the development process.
Apple Maps was intended as a replacement for Google Maps, which is currently unavailable to iOS 6 users as a standalone app. Apple wowed developers with its work on 3D graphic and turn-by-turn navigation to put their offering over Google Maps but emphasised the app would be a work in progress, as was the case with voice assistant Siri in iOS 5.
Still, the inability to tell oceans apart from land masses could be seen as something of a weakness in the software.
In the meantime Minister for Justice Alan Shatter said Apple would be contacted about the Airfield Park error and warned aganist pilots using Apple Maps as a landing guide and suggested a more accurate tagging icon to the current airplane, such as a cow or a flower. "An aircraft is an entirely inappropriate flight of imagination," he said in a statement.
TechCentral Reporters
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers