Announcing Quantum Lock on IOS 6.1! 
Seriously I’ve been loving and giggling over the whole mapping debacle, I knew when they stopped using Google and tried to do it themselves this would happen – mature mapping takes years, Google had enough ribbing over swimming to New York etc. but difference was people weren’t actually relying on their maps then. I also tried the idea of ‘cloud based maps’ and ‘cloud based public transport info’ on John and the face he pulled was so priceless I really should’ve taken a panorama picture of it (something my phone’s been able to do for months too).
There are some things you can’t use crowdsourcing for, and public transport info and mapping is two of them. Yeah sure, where your local Tesco is, yes….but where your local hospital is, or isn’t, is rather an important one, best not trusted to say a 12 year old student in Sichuan?
And to cap it all, Apple can’t click and zoom itself out of this trouble…thing is, when you start getting all litigious about ownership, patents etc (even ones that seem to be from other companies, or had extensive prior art) other parties that might’ve let things slide in the past start to get worried that you might start claiming their IPR too. He who casts the first stone, indeed as all patent trolls eventually find out. Didn’t IBM try this trick with Windows in the 80′s then disappear under a flurry of writs? Or did I imagine that? It does seem a mark of desperation – if you’re better you don’t really care who copies you since you’re selling well and are the best. But that actually was only briefly the case for iPhone til Android and it’s ‘stolen technology’ (Rounded square like all phones! check! icons that are clickable just like my pre-iPhone Sony Ericsson! check! Touchscreen and wifi – ditto, etc).
If you check the Gartner figures a lot of the World’s #1 smartphone was a PR mirage – since 2009-2010 other smartphones have outsold it in the US and Worldwide, now at something like 3 or 4 Samsung phone to 1 iPhone currently – that figure might have changed with the new iPhone5 but against all Android phones? I have me doots.
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