My point in response was just that GMaps has had the best of both worlds for a couple of years now,
Got that. I was replying to Andy. The functionality you're describing however is likely specific to the maps app on Android, right?
Originally Posted By: andy
My point was that given the choice of having a crappy map delivery in vector form, as opposed to a good map in raster, that I would take the raster every time. i.e. that the quality of the map itself is far, far more important to me than how it is delivered.
Understood as well. I was talking about the same back-end data from the same provider expressed in two different ways, not making a distinction between providers with different level of detail/quality.
From a usability perspective, the consumer can only see what's rendered in their app, and having the map data within the app itself when you don't have a network connection, is always going to trump having only some pre-rendered bitmaps.
There are plenty of useless map apps in the App Store using pre-rendered bitmaps. I said map and not nav on purpose, because these guys don't have enough data to provide routing. Which itself is OK as long as that's the kind of app you're looking for, which I was at the time.
For me, I want good street-level detail in a mapping app and a navigating app, with the ability to alter the presented detail level by zooming and/or other preferences. In iOS, the built-in maps app didn't offer that without a data connection - and it was slow, and of course wasn't a turn-by-turn based navigation app at all. And I wasn't able to find that in another non-nav local-based app either. So in the end I use Tom Tom's app for both purposes.
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