iOS 6 launched yesterday, with one very notable absence: Google Maps. As part of its fallout with Google, Apple ditched the big G’s mapping service in favour of its own homecooked version.

But the new service isn’t going down well with people who’ve tried it.

Apple’s Maps app is a hotchpotch, with info provided by TomTom NV and OpenStreetMap. And people are complaining it feels like a rush job.

“Apple believes that they can deliver a better experience for customers than Google,” Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research, told Bloomberg. “But in the short term, Google has a better mapping application, and iPhone customers will suffer.”

Ian Betteridge, ex-editor of MacUser, goes one step further, calling it “the most half-cooked piece of software that Apple has released”. Once outside the M25, satellite images become “blurry, pixellated, useless nonsense”. In some cases, the data are 15 years out of date.

It’s all the worse because of how reliant we’ve become on using our phones to find places.

Maps does give you Flyover, which lets you adjust the degree of 3D-ness. It’s a pretty nifty way of finding your way around. But what you gain in fancy 3D skills you lose in usability: Google Streetview is gone, as is its Traffic and Transit functions. So if you’re using public transport, you’ll have to rely on the timetables.

Quite an oversight. Or is it actually a canny move by Apple? A few months ago Gizmodo speculated Apple could be leaving out public transport info in order to encourage app makers to get on the case. The more apps are out there, the more Apple will coin it. So while Maps might not be too polished at the moment, it could all fit in with Apple’s master plan.

How have you been getting on with Maps? Let us know in the comments below.

Sony is determined to distinguish the games available through its PlayStation Mobile platform from the somewhat variable quality often found on mobile app stores – and now it’s outlined just how it plans to do that.

The Google Play store might have a huge amount of games on it nowadays, but even the most ardent Android fan would have to admit that the quality isn’t always that great. One you set aside the top-notch titles like GTA 3 and Angry Birds, it isn’t long before you run into derivative clones and crapware. Sony is determined that the same won’t be true when its PlayStation Mobile suite finally hits Android and the PlayStation Vita and has decided to do something about it.

The best Android apps of all time: Top 100

Sony’s Jim Ryan said that the company is taking steps to ensure that, “anything that is offered on this platform is of proper PlayStation quality and that people feel comfortable and safe that they are not going to inadvertently stumble upon any of the junk that exists in that wider marketplace.” This sounds like a tall order, but Sony is able to restrict the developers who are allowed on the PlayStation Mobile store, which is currently in an open beta for developers to try out.

Rather than get heavy right away though, Sony is hoping a more softly softly approach will work. “The dev kit is available to anyone who is interested in looking at it but we are actively evangelising in all sorts of ways to get the sort of content we want there for the launch,” said Ryan.

It seems like a good idea, but we do hope that Sony’s desire to ensure quality doesn’t lead it into accidentally squashing innovation. Some of the best ideas might seem a little out there at first glance and take time to bed in.

[Source: gi.biz]

With Amazon’s  giant killing Android slab the Kindle Fire on the way to the UK, Android tablet makers have every right to be nervous. Could a new budget tablet from Disgo have what it takes to see it off and take on the iPad too?

Amazon’s Kindle Fire  has succeeded in the US due to a magic combination of form factor (smaller than an iPad, bigger than a phablet) software (Amazon’s remix of Android) and low price – plus access to Amazon’s not inconsiderable library of media. With the Fire looking likely to get a UK launch this year, are there any other contenders who could take it on?

One possibility is the Disgo 9104. This may lose out of the cool name front (seriously, could it be any more generic?) but it can more match the Fire on specs and comes close in price.

New report reveals why Android still desperately needs a tablet success story

The 9104 (guys, you really REALLY need to think of a better name) has a 9.7” capacitive display that runs at 1024 x 768. The CPU is a single-core 1.2 GHz A8 ARM processor that uses 1GB of DDR3 memory. 16GB of flash storage comes as standard, expandable to up to 48GB via microSD.

A 2 megapixel rear and  0.3 megapixel front camera won’t win any awards, but they are better than the Kindle Fire’s ‘no camera at all’. The tablet runs stock Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3, without any rubbish ‘improvements’. The only major fly in the ointment we can see is that there is no mention of the official Play store (there is a ‘Disgo Apps’ store instead). This may be a problem. Oh, and at £179 it is £50 more expensive than an imported Kindle Fire. But then, we don’t know if any UK Fire would be as cheap as it is in the US anyway.

You can grab a Disgo 9104 from mid June from all the usual high street stockists.

Samsung is working on its own social network that it hopes will rival Facebook. The unnamed project will add social integration across Samsung’s portfolio of gadgets, including smartphones, smart TVs and even cameras. Yeah, cameras.

Hearing that a company is working on a ‘Facebook rival’ is not something that usually inspires confidence. Many have tried, even Google has had a crack with Google+, which is not quite up there with Facebook when it comes to user numbers, to put it mildly. Samsung is riding high at the moment however and given how it has put a dent in Apple’s smartphone crown with its Galaxy series of Android, who knows? It might just be able to pull something off.

Korea Times is reporting that Samsung is planning a move into social, with a new project that doesn’t have an official title yet but which is know internally as “Samsung Facebook”, which is pretty on the nose. Rather than a stand alone social site, Samsung is said to be building a social network into its products.

The service will apparently focus on messaging, photo and media sharing and will be accessible from a variety of Samsung devices. This will include the obvious ones like Samsung Android phones but also less obvious gadgets like smart TVs and Samsung’s range of digital cameras. This may then expand to include devices from other manufacturers.

“The eventual goal is to expand our social media service across different devices from different companies across different mobile platforms. That includes cameras, televisions and Blu-ray players,” a spokesman told Korea times.

Do we need another social network? Are you sick of Facebook and ready to start updating your status on your telly instead? Let us know in the comments.

[source: Korea Times]

Amazon’s Appstore (motto: “No space! You can’t touch us!”) has been grating on our nerves since March last year by just sort of sitting there offering amazing free apps and exclusive game launches that we can’t get our hands on in the UK without some very underhand business involving proxy servers and black magic.

Worse, the lack of an Amazon Appstore meant that the necessary infrastructure for the Kindle Fire wasn’t in place, so Amazon’s wildly popular iPad alternative couldn’t get a UK or EU release either.

At least one of these things is about to change as All Things D reports that Amazon is planning to launch the Appstore in Europe later this Summer. No dates have been announced, but the Book/CD/Everything shop is said to be talking to developers about getting their apps listed on the EU version of the store.

Once the Appstore launches with a library of Android apps, the stage should be set for Amazon to release the Kindle Fire with the necessary approved Android apps and access to Amazon’s media library and storefront. The tablet has proven hugely popular in the US, where it has been a solid competitor to Apple’s iPad and is far and away the most popular Android tablet – even if it one that Google has nothing to do with.

[source: All Things D]

The official, free ad-supported National Rail Enquiries app for iPhone and Android 2.2 and up finally patches a glaring hole in National Rail’s service, and we’re relieved to report it does it rather well (Before you ask: no, the popular UK Train Times app that’s been out for years on iPhone wasn’t official, it just used National Rail’s logo until February this year, when the Association of Train Operating Companies asked it to stop).

Further reading:

• The best Android apps of all time: Top 100
• The best iPhone apps of all time: Top 100
• The best Windows Phone apps of all time: Top 100 

From the app, you can check departure boards and plan journeys (even offline), set favourite routes, get disruption updates and even receive push alerts if something’s gone horribly wrong on your commute (You can set the parameters for this in the settings).

Those fond of a kip can also set an alarm to go off when you reach your stop, while route planning in the capital also takes into account Zone 1 Underground stations and the Docklands Light Railway.

We’ve given it a quick test on Android, and it’s a snappy, clearly designed app which does just about everything you’d need it to. The app’s design is consistent across both platforms (which does mean the back and search buttons on Android phones do nothing), and adverts are unobtrusive. Admittedly, this does make us wonder who’d choose to upgrade to remove them for the exorbitant price of £4.99, but hey, your loss.

Windows Phone and BlackBerry users, sadly, are left out in the cold with this one, but fret not: against all the odds, National Rail’s mobile site is actually rather good, and efficient, and free. Who’d have thought?

“Over the next couple of years somebody’s going to build a game that reaches a billion people,” Bart Decrem, publisher of hit iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge, told a gathering of journalists and toy makers at a briefing in London this week.

That’s a sixth of the world’s population, but as daunting as that is, it’s a feat that’s beginning to look feasible. Angry Birds isn’t far off: Rovio has clocked more than 500 million downloads of its spectacular gaming success.

But Decrem doesn’t work for Rovio. Decrem is Disney’s new head of mobile, and he wants to get there first. But using Disney’s instantly recognisable characters to do so? Too easy.

Disney – no stranger to technology – has a whole array of characters it could launch on to the iPhone App Store. And while it does dabble in this (AppMATes, an iPad app that interacts with toys from the movie Cars 2, was released last year), Decrem doesn’t seem remotely interested in pursuing this.

“For existing IPs [intellectual properties] we still do some of this,” he explains. “They do well but they disappear…the other thing we’re trying to do is build new Disney characters.”

And these new characters have to capture our imaginations like never before. “Smartphones, people love them. They’re fun and beautiful and perfect, and apps that stand out are fun and beautiful and perfect. But how do you stand out on the app store when there are 500,000 apps?”

Decrem’s answer is Where’s My Water? It’s a charming, physics based gamed in the same vein as Cut The Rope. You’ve got to guide the water through a level to reach Swampy, a rather nervous alligator. (You can download it on iPhone and Android).

It’s the big-eyed, bashful star, Decrem says, that has led to Where’s My Water’s success. He won’t talk download numbers, but it’s been the number one paid on the iPhone App Store in 79 countries, and sat at the top in the US for 45 days. To that end, Decrem’s team worked with Disney’s animators to come up with these adorable characters and setting. “The challenge for us is to create new characters, and on new devices.”

Exclusive: How Cut The Rope survived the cutting room floor

Decrem is animated when he speaks – pun very much intended. He’s as far removed from the stuffy, suit wearing Disney middle manager you might expect as possible. Belgian born, he’s already a Silicon Valley legend. He worked on the original Firefox browser, and has sold several companies already: Tapulous to Disney in 2010, and social web browser Flock to Zynga last year.

It’s this background that has helped Decrem give the megacorp’s new division an injection of pragmatism in a famously inflexible Disney (we’ll release our films on DVD when we feel like it, and you’ll like it).

For one, his attitude towards freemium business models is, shall we say, expedient. Where’s My Water still generates most of its revenue from paid-up front versions of the game, but Disney now offers free to play versions on both iOS and Android too. Decrem would rather get maximum eye balls on the game, rather than maximum dollar dollar bill.

“You have to build freemium models, but the great thing is they can reach a lot of players. You can reach a billion people at low cost.”

• Best Android apps of all time: Top 100
• Best Windows Phone apps of all time: Top 100 

The end game? “Underneath it all we’re building a network layer,” he says. That network will provide a large, pre-prepared audience for Disney’s next new game – Decrem says new franchises are a priority – giving them a head start on getting to that ten digit audience.

And, Decrem says, they’re already well on the way. “After Angry Birds there’s nothing ahead of us on the app store in terms of cultural phenomenon.” Quite the boast. Alongside a promised high-res Retina Display update for the game on iPad, Disney has commissioned a series of YouTube videos starring Swampy and Bowser-ish antagonist Cranky in the hopes cashing in on this – you can expect other merchandise to follow.

Of course, we reckon Nom would have something to say about Decrem’s claim. But if the candy munching blob is the start of 21st century gaming, he’s got some stiff competition from the biggest media company of last century to contend with.

The tech world may not have fully calmed down after yesterday’s announcement of the Retina display-packing new iPad, but that hasn’t stopped chip-set maker Nvidia from picking apart some of the more spurious claims surrounding Apple’s new world-beating tablet.

Apple has gleefully stated that the shiny new dual-core AX5 processor that resides inside the new iPad offers four times the power of Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip, which is used in the stupendously powerful Asus Transformer Prime. That’s a bold statement to make – and exciting if true – but what has ruffled Nvidia’s feathers is that Apple supplied no indication of the kind of benchmarking process it used to arrive at such a conclusion.

Tech firms are forever making exaggerated claims about the power of their products in relation to those of their rivals, but most usually cite some kind of officially recognised benchmarking process when they do so. The graph Apple displayed at its iPad event yesterday did nothing of the sort – so at the moment, whether or not you believe that the AX5 is four times more powerful than the Tegra 3 very much depends on how far you trust the House that Steve Jobs built.

We’re betting that most fans will be willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt in this case, leaving Android lovers to quietly seethe with rage.

(Via ZDNet)

As the stunning HTC One S is a smaller sibling to the One X, so the Sony Xperia P keeps most of its bigger brother’s angular, Walkman-esque stylings in a smaller chassis. Its 4-inch 960×540 screen is smaller, and the camera is an eight megapixel job, rather than twelve, but it can still record full HD video courtesy of a none-too-shabby ST-Ericsson dual-core 1GHz processor.

The display – a “Reality” one, as Sony likes to call it – immediately pales in comparison to the Super AMOLED screen on the One S. It’s extremely bright and trumps it for outdoor viewing, but that bright white light bleeds into everything. Blacks are a dull grey, and contrasts aren’t wide.

Even for a mid-range phone, its dimensions, 122×59.5×10.5mm, aren’t too flattering – the lack of curved edges only leaves it looking even thicker than tapered rivals. Still, there’s a certain, rigid, ye olde Sony charm to its looks, and it’s nice to see Sony extend its looks across it portfolio.

One thing that’s different and rather confusing: where the home, back and menu buttons are capacitive buttons above the striking transparent strip on the Xperia S, they’re built into the strip on the P. It’s rather confusing, and in the prototype we tested, not particularly responsive either.

One welcome feature that’s present on both: the HDMI-dock. Plugging the Sony Xperia P into your telly doesn’t just share its screen, or let you control it with your remote if the TV is HDMI-CEC compatible. It launches a specialised TV launcher interface with a number of icons for apps you’re most likely to use from the sofa – YouTube and Videos Unlimited, for instance. You can add your own, and even remap the controls on your remote: it’s by far the most accomplished TV interface we’ve ever seen on a phone, and one we could genuinely see ourselves using.

Things come crashing down however with the software build: the Sony Xperia P is running Android 2.3 with a similar skin to last year’s models like the Arc, leaving out all the wonderful extras you get with Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”, now starting to appear on rival manufacturers’ devices.

A spokesperson suggested that the Sony Xperia P might yet ship with Android 4.0 out of the box, but Sony Mobile’s website says to expect Android 2.3 Gingerbread however, with an update to follow.

We really hope that isn’t the case come launch in April, as Sony Ericsson’s track record with delivering software updates wasn’t just bad, but something closer to a hate crime. Add in the inevitable delays as your network puts the the update through its own testing, and who knows when you’ll actually get it.

It’s a real shame, as otherwise, this has the potential to be a great follow up to the Xperia Arc and Xperia Neo. Check out the pictures in the gallery above, and let us know what you make of it in the comments.

We’ve got the first raw 808 PureView shots to show you, so you can judge for yourself.

The Symbian-powered Nokia 808 PureView is a marvel. Out of nowhere, Nokia’s just slapped the best camera phone we’ve ever seen down on the table, while the iPhone 4S and its other nearest competitors tug nervously at their collars.

Nokia 808 PureView: The 41-Megapixel camera phone

All the specs are there for the phone to produce some achingly beautiful shots, so it’s reassuring that on first glance it’s done just that. These are official pictures from Nokia, but they’re untouched, raw pictures straight from the Nokia 808 PureView’s Carl Zeiss lens. And they’re stunning.

Have a look at the shots and try and think if you’ve ever seen raw images as clear as this from any other phone. We doubt it. The one of the close-up of the rope is especially impressive in terms of detail. Of course, we’ve edited these down to get them on the site. If you want the full, original images, hit the link below:

- Download the full-size images here

Has this sold you on Nokia’s wunderkind cam-phone? Let us know below.