[georgemcbay]

"It's worth noting that Google had absolutely everything they needed to do this years ago, and just... didn't."

This is so true and so sad. Google Voice, why are you so almost great and so neglected?

I have to say though that my disappointment in Google Voice is quickly being matched by my disappointment in Google Maps which actually was great but continually gets less so with each release.

[bane]

I would have agreed with you except I'm actually liking the very latest bump. Telling me which lanes to get into to make an exit? Brilliant. I think it's also taking traffic into account now.

[greggman]

Telling you which lane to get in is like a 12 year old feature of car navigation systems isn't it? I certainly remember the car navigation systems in rental cars from 12 years ago having that feature.

Same with taking traffic into account, especially in Japanese systems which have done that since like 2004.

If Google finally got around to adding those features that's great but hardly worthy of "brilliant" praise for something that's been around for years.

[_pmf_]

> If Google finally got around to adding those features that's great but hardly worthy of "brilliant" praise for something that's been around for years.

We only do that if it's Apple, right?

[natevancouver]

In my town Google Maps has traffic “data” for every side street and it’s usually wrong or irrelevant. A red light at an intersection will show up as a traffic jam and then I’ll get weird routes trying to go around it.

Traffic for freeways, on the other hand, is amazing.

This likely has to do with the quality of traffic data provided by the municipality. But Apple Maps doesn’t have the same problem. Their side-street traffic data is reliable around here – very surprising.

[IanCal]

I'm pretty sure maps uses data from a few sources, one being how fast android devices are moving near there.

[thebokehwokeh2]

Traffic integration is most probably Google's acquisition of Waze. It'll probably only get better.

[dragonwriter]

Google Maps definitely made traffic-based time estimates for routes and (AFAICT) also made route choices based on traffic before the Waze acquisition, though its traffic data has gotten better since the Waze acquisition (particularly, it extends to more non-freeway routes) and it has more information on the source of traffic problems (which appears to be largely directly because of Waze, since it credits information to its source and "reported by Waze" seems to be by far the most common source of most kinds of reports).

[georgemcbay]

This is true, Google Maps definitely has done traffic avoidance for years, even before the Waze acquisition. I think prior to Waze it was a completely self-contained reporting system though (other people using Google Nav on Android were automatically/anonymously feeding their speed/route back to the homebase and that was used to detect traffic anomalies). Presumably they now have more data to work from.

[chemmail]

I've been an embedded user of google voice since it was grand central and tried to move over to android, but that OS seems to be a bigger mess than Windows Mobile phone. It's a bit ironic that the people who love it don't really do anything on their phone, they don't use the "openness" android supposedly gives. With Jailbreak, IOS is pretty amazing.

[alexqgb]

UX on the turn by turn directions is peerless. But the original promise (a search box for the real world) keeps coming up short. Indeed, the results seem to be getting more unfocused and incomplete as time goes by.

[boobsbr]

I used to be able to easily find the street names, now they're crowded with POIs and I have to zoom in and out and pan around to find the street name.

[the_watcher]

Yea, what's going on with Maps? It used to almost always get me to the right place when I searched, now, half the time it tries to send me to Bangalore or across the country until I add a city parameter.

[arethuza]

It does seem to have got a bit silly - I searched recently for directions from Edinburgh to Falkland (a village less than an hour away, but a fairly popular tourist destination) and it thought I wanted to go from Edinburgh to the Falkland Islands....

I'm pretty sure Maps didn't used to do dumb things like that.

[mentat]

I have to agree with Maps issues as well. Latest release was the worst directions I've ever received electronically which is saying something...

[toyg]

>Google Voice, why are you so almost great and so neglected?

Because it pisses off carriers (big telcos), and Android vendors (unlike Apple) really need carriers.

[kmfrk]

I think Apple were still a little afraid of pissing off carriers, when they didn't make a big deal out of FaceTime Audio calls.