Apple Maps OF DOOM AND FAIL

Like a techno-Ninja, I emerge triumphant as I download and install Apple's new IOS6 operating system on my iPad and iPhone, because I am a smug Apple mobile device owner.

 

But what's this? Where has the good old, reliable, Google Maps gone? And what's this imposter Apple Maps that has appeared in its place. I am not the only person flummoxed by Apple dropping a perfectly cromulent service for one of their own, especially as reports emerge of - let's be honest - a certain lack of accuracy. Word comes in of apocalyptic images of destroyed cities and death, death, DEATH. Apple's maps are -oh-ho! - rotten to the core!!!

In fact, I'm pretty sure we're all agreed, Apple Maps features some of the worst mapping blunders since some monk sat down in front of a blank piece of parchment and wrote "Here be Dragons" and "Beware of Ye Edge of Ye Worlde" to save himself a bit of work.

Worse, even than those (quite possibly apocryphal) Victorian explorers, who pointing at a mountain and hoping for its name, wrote down the local dialect for "It's a mountain, you bloody idiot" before going off and actually naming it after the man who was daft enough to front the money for the whole expedition.

Jane decided to take a look at her home village, only to discover that not only does it not exist (although a recent nuclear attack you might have missed could be to blame), but neither do many of the roads leading to the place.

Then there is Basingstoke, a town of 83,000 people, lifted bodily and dumped in the middle of a field ten miles to the west, with the tiny village of Wasing (population three blokes and a dog) getting a promotion to the rank of "urban sprawl".

Basingstoke: Somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire. Presumably where the Apple Maps developers left an important part of their brain.

Oh, and that's not Aldershot, that's Farnborough Airfield, where they hold the world famous Aldershot Air Show.

So, the proof being in the pudding, I tested Apple Maps to see if it really IS dreadful with a guided trip from home in Fleet to work in Reading.

All seemed to work well enough until I neared my destination, where I was dumped on my own, in rough end of town, clutching an iPad. So, yes. Personal experience says it is terrible. And a bit scary.