The iOS 6 Review: Maps Thoroughly Investigated and More
by Brian Klug & Saumitra Bhagwat on September 19, 2012 2:21 PM ESTMobile Safari
There are really only a few things that a smartphone OS needs to do right. Messaging (SMS and email), 3rd party applications (with a marketplace), PIM (personal information management – calendar, contacts, etc), and finally inclusion of a decent web browser. This last section is devoted to the iOS 6 improvements to Safari.
With iOS 6, Apple hasn’t dramatically changed anything but (you guessed it), made some tweaks. First is the inclusion of a full screen mode for landscape.
(Left) New fullscreen button at bottom right, (Right), Full screen view for Safari in iOS 6
If you rotate into landscape, there’s a new full screen icon which appears. Tap it and boom you’re given a full screen browsing experience without the loss of status bar and bottom bar. Tapping again in full screen mode brings up the toggle to switch back into windowed mode.
The other new feature is inclusion of an offline reading mode. Tapping on the send/action button lets you send the current page to an offline cache. I have no doubt this leverages some of the reading view backend. There’s a progress indicator under the bookmarks icon while the device is caching pages for reading offline, and it continues on into the background. Going in that menu brings you to another category with a list of what all you’ve made offline that has and hasn’t been read yet.
Currently open on the desktop
Another feature is iCloud tabs, which as the name suggests syncs open tabs across devices with iCloud logins. At some level this brings MobileSafari back up to parity with the equivalent feature in Chrome (synced tabs).
JavaScript Performance
This section wouldn’t be complete without mention of the speedups made to Nitro for MobileSafari, which is Apple’s JavaScript JIT engine which works for ARMv7. I tested the iPhone 4 and 4S on iOS 5.1.1 and iOS 6 GM and saw around a 10% and 30% improvement, respectively. I’m not entirely sure why there’s such a discrepancy between the two, however it’s possible that the new Nitro sends things off to multiple threads more effectively.
| iOS 5.1.1 versus iOS 6 GM | ||||||||
| Device | iOS Version | Sunspider 0.9.1 | Browsermark | HTML5test.com | css3test.com | |||
| iPhone 4 | iOS 5.1.1 | 3553.1 | 52557.0 | 324+9b | 459 of 946, 221 | |||
| iOS 6 GM | 3358.8 | 57351.0 | 360+9b | 498 of 946, 221 | ||||
| iPhone 4S | iOS 5.1.1 | 2242.9 | 86062.0 | N/A | N/A | |||
| iOS 6 GM | 1716.0 | 109775.0 | N/A | N/A | ||||
There’s also a nice jump in HTML5 feature support, which I’m always a fan of seeing. The user agent string in iOS 6 GM now reports webkit 536.26 alongside safari version 8536.25.
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Leonick - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
The satellite images are interesting. You can zoom further in on my house in the middle of a forest in Sweden than you can Seoul, the image is in greyscale for some reason but you get fairly close and it's also fairly recent. (A shame the road that goes by the house doesn't have a name or can be found with search even though the road itself is on the map.)Another interesting thing that I noticed while looking around is that at least here in Sweden Apple seem to have a lot more current imagery than Google or even Eniro (local service) does (Eniro seem to mostly have the same as Google though). In Kalmar, a moderately sized city on the south eastern coast a bridge was constructed over the railroad about 2-3 years ago, in Google Maps there are just two piles of sand on both sides where the bridge will be, in Apples imagery the bridge is there.
Spoelie - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Wouldn't it be swell for Google to now sue Apple over mundane features like dropping a pin in their maps app? Sweet vengeance over Apple suing OEMs over the bounce animation or showing a menu while tapping on numbers, ...Not that I agree with such practices, but at least it would balance things out ;)
yticolev - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link
If I'm not mistaken, the push pin in the Maps app is Apple developed, not Google. The entire Maps app used an Apple interface with Google data.welltoldtales - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
"one of the new OSes have done a great job of dealing with the problem of displaying content from two applications at once"I know people will rip me for saying this, but the Blackberry Playbook actually does THE best job of multitasking. Having used on with my work I attempted to use a 3rd gen iPad and simply couldn't handle the lack of multitasking. Same with an ASUS Transformer.
steven75 - Tuesday, September 25, 2012 - link
Do you know about the multitouch gestures? Most iPad users do not, but they are indispensable for multitasking.faizoff - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
There seems to be many people unhappy with the native maps app. I read about it yesterday in many forums but today many news sites seem to be reporting it as well.Heck BusinessInsider has a step by step guide to get the website google maps on your home screen.
http://www.businessinsider.com/get-google-maps-bac...
Conficio - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
"and at present it [Google] literally is the 9000 pound gorilla for maps."That is only true if the Google maps can connect to the Google servers. If that connection is not there a 5 year old navigation device with no updates beats it hands down.
Flying Goat - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Have you played with Google maps offline mode? I haven't, but it may be handy, assuming you plan in advance, of course.chinkgai - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
i'm not sure i like his writing style. he doesn't seem as concise as the other writers here.marioyohanes - Thursday, September 20, 2012 - link
Brian, you might wanna check Siri again in international location, I'm pretty sure Dubai will works just great now. From my experience in Jakarta Indonesia, last week I couldn't ask Siri for anything related to location based questions. However, yesterday, as iOS 6 officially launched, I can even ask Siri for nearest dentist and it even listing nearest food stall with delivery option. I'm very overwhelmed with how good Siri is righ now, for the first time, my investment in 4S paid off :)