Apple Maps vs Google Maps vs Here maps – Full Comparison

A new contender has appeared in the mapping apps category. The newcomer is HERE (pun intended), a mapping app by Nokia which was just recently released for iPhone and iPad . If we were to correlate the fact that Nokia owns NAVTEQ which is among the very few providers of thorough mapping data (the others being Tele Atlas which belongs to TomTom and Google) with the fact that they produced mapping apps for mobiles (Symbian and Windows Mobile) for many years, we could deduct that HERE maps is going to be a quality mapping app. However how does it stand against already established apps, either natively available or which can be found in the App Store is a question we will try to answer next. We will try to present you the high points and the low points of each of these three mapping applications available on iOS and we will do this by dedicating a section to each one of them so that you would be able to determine which is the best choice for your needs. We will start with HERE Maps and we will also take the opportunity to make a short review:

Nokia’s HERE Maps

Being the newest addition to the list of mapping maps, HERE Maps is the app that we will dissect first. As we mentioned in this article’s opening paragraph, HERE Maps was released this month on the iPad and on the iPhone. It offers transit, walking and driving information but, as you will probably be surprised to find out, HERE Maps inexplicably doesn’t give you navigation guided by voice for driving, which is a really strange decision from Nokia. You can get voiced walking directions though.

HERE Maps’ interface is minimalist and only offers the information you need and nothing else. Regarding map views, you have the option to choose between these views: satellite, regular map, public transport and live traffic. Another available view is Community views and that basically means maps updated by people.  The Community views is a feature that varies in usefulness depending on how active the community is where you live.

You can search for a place by simply tapping the search field and typing the name of the place you are looking for. HERE Maps has an auto suggest feature that will try to guess the place you are looking for, as you type it, and if it does correctly suggest the place you are looking for, all you need to do is tap on it and it will be presented to you on the map. Tap on it on the map and you will be offered some information like the address, phone, the route button and even the option to share it. The route button will let you choose between walking, transit and driving directions. Under the displayed information, there is a list of nearby places (restaurants, shops, clubs, sights and public transportation), which is especially nice if you are a tourist visiting foreign countries.

Besides what we already talked about, HERE Maps also offers the following features:

• Live traffic rerouting (only available in some countries) and visualization on the map (again, this feature is only available in some countries);
• It offers 3rd party content (like ViaMichelin and Lonely Planet);
• It allows your social networking sessions (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare amongst others) to be location aware;
• It allows street maps to be preloaded so that you can use them while offline;
• It has a Weather application (with local meteorologic conditions from hour to hour and forecasts for the week), night view, satellite & terrain maps, 3D building and 3D maps;
• Public transit line and routing in some cities;
• You can sync your favorites between the website and your iPhone;

Google Maps

Google Maps does not need any kind of presentation. You probably know by know that it is a web mapping app developed by Google corporation. It is used in quite a few map based services (for example Google Ride Finder and Google Transit). Google Maps has street maps, a route planer for when you are walking, driving, cycling (this feature is still in beta) or using public transportation; it also has an urban business locator available for many countries across the globe. It also offers satellite view, but these high resolution images (which are available for most urban areas in the world) are not updated in real time; instead they can be several months or several years old so accuracy is most of the times out of the question.

Google Maps is also used for educational purpose. To this end, it offers tools such as Google Moon (using public domain images of the Moon, Google Moon let’s you see the landing sites of all the Apollo spacecrafts that landed on the Moon and if you zoom in on a landing site location you get information about that mission), Google Mars (which uses images collected from 2 of NASA’s Mars missions: Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey, to provide visible imagery view, infrared view and an elevation view of the planet Mars) and Google Sky (which uses images provided by the Hubble Space Telescope and allows you to pan through the visible universe).

Google Transit is another interesting feature. It is a public transport route planner – it is a service intended to calculate route, the cost and the time of transit, and it can even compare the trip to one using a car. At launch, there was only support for Portland but now it supports hundreds of cities from many countries like the United States and Canada (in both of these states, with almost full coverage), Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand. In some parts of the world Google Transit only covers part of the transit agencies (like in the United Kingdom for example).

We already mentioned you can get directions via a route planer for  walking, driving, cycling (which is in beta) or using public transportation. It is as simple as choosing “Get Directions” and then choosing the point of departure and the point of arrival. Driving directions cover many many countries across the globe, to many for us to list here.

Another well known feature of Google Maps is Street View. Street View offers first person panoramic view from many cities across the globe, accessible after zooming in past the highest zooming level. This feature uses images captured on location thus being able to offer a 360° panoramic street level view from the supported locations.  This feature is available on the iPhone since November 21 2008.

Aerial View is another feature of Google Maps, one that offers a bird’s eye view of the supported cities.

Apple’s Maps

Maps is the name of Apple’s own mapping app, released for its iOS devices. The app debuted in the first iPhone (from 2007) and back then it had Google Maps at its core. As of 2012, in an effort to compete with Google in terms of mapping apps, Apple abandoned Google Maps and instead, the company built its own mapping service that makes use of Apple’s own mapping system while data is supplied by TomTom and and AutoNavi (for the Chinese version, AutoNavi being a Chinese mapping company).

Among its features, there are turn by turn voiced directions, interactive 3D views (which have added information, like signs and arrows for example), traffic information updated in real time plus it can calculate the ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival), a Flyover feature (which offers an interactive 3d view of major cities, allowing you to explore them by ways of zooming, tilting and rotating around them). Maps also supports Siri, so if you are really hungry, you can ask Siri where the closest restaurant is located and Siri will find it for you with the help of the Maps app). Another notable feature is local search which gives you a lot of useful information (you can obtain photos, an address and a website and you can even dial phone numbers with a simple tap) about locations on the map.

Conclusions

Nokia’s new mapping app, HERE Maps, won’t replace your navigation apps, at least not very soon, but it is a nice addition when it comes to mapping apps, so you do have reasons to keep it in your iPhone. The number one reason to keep it is the apps’ walking and transit support; besides that, the nearby places feature can be very interesting and useful. You won’t need it very much while behind the wheel of your car since there is no spoken navigation support while driving. However, while traveling on foot, Nokia’s HERE Maps is a pretty good (and cheap too) mapping app to have.  For all those other times, you can stick to your favorite navigation app.