First let me say that I have come to think of my iPhone as a natural extension of my body. Despite its shortfalls I find it awesome and useful to a degree which is hard to comprehend, let alone describe. The gps/map function is something I enjoy immensely, mostly because I have the sense of direction of a 5 year old in a merry-go-round who has absolutely no sense of direction. Therefore it came as a big surprise to me that when arriving in Japan for a fortnights holiday, that here my iPhone could tell me my exact location, and not much more. What's the problem? You might say. You get a map and a location what more do you need. Well for me this seems equivalent to a car gps system saying "You are in a car".
Let me elaborate a little bit. For a map to be useful it must have to qualities: You must be able to find the places of interest on the map and you must be able to correlate the map and reality to a certain degree - the iPhone could do neither.
The problem is basically this: Google maps on the iPhone is in japanese, written kanji. Road names, train stations, parks everything written with beautiful but completely incomprehensible japanese letters. This has a number of consequences for non-japanese speaking people.
1. You can‘t search for the place you need to go or things you are interested in.
2. You have great difficulty matching road signs with the iPhone map.
3. Directions for trains and busses becomes something like "go to 新宿 and take the 山手 line ..."
Let me give a example: I like manga (Japanese cartoons) so naturally I search in google maps for "manga" when I get to Kyoto, our first stop. This is the result:
(same result for Tokyo), even tough this is a few kilometers from the International Manga Museum and god knows how may shops with manga books (Manga, Japan is actually a small city (I think)). I don't know the technical reason for this problem, but it is definitely not a lone example. Almost every search you make will turn up useless or misleading. We actually let the iPhone guide us to a the location of a bakery, only to find - not a bakery!Also I found that in Tokyo it is not possible to get walking direction from the iPhone - despite the fact that all the streets I came across had sidewalks. So if you ask for directions using the mass transit option you get a straight line to the nearest station and the allot of japanese characters telling you where to go - in japanese. Not very useful I should say.
The strange thing is that as I understand it there the cell networks only have 3G and higher so you have excellent data coverage everywhere.
Well I chose to use my iPhone to check email and a bit of surfing, so now I‘m waiting for the data bill from my phone company... ouch.
