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AroundMe in the Vicinity of Google Maps

By Steve Litchfield on October 10, 2008

The sheer usefulness of finding ‘stuff around you’ has meant the emergence of several pretenders, despite the ubiquitous presence of Google Maps itself. AroundMe (at first commercial, but now free) and Vicinity (always free) are also well established now, but in the interests of keeping things simple (and reducing the clutter slightly on your application screens), the question remains ‘Is it worth looking things up in these ‘extra’ solutions?’

With this in mind, I put all three to the same tests. Read on.

Test 1: I need to travel. Find me the nearest mainline railway station

Google Maps: All the local stations were found (search string “Trains”), but I got ‘not found’ when trying to plan a route to the nearest. Routing was fine to the second nearest though. A seamless, though not perfect, experience. 8/10

Vicinity: Staggeringly, railway stations aren’t included in its databases. 0/10

AroundMe: Ditto. I chose finding a railway station at random before starting this roundup and am frankly dumbfounded that perhaps the number 1 search category is not included in either app. 0/10

Test 2: Find me an Italian restaurant

Google Maps: Typing in ‘Italian’ was enough to get me the two closest restaurants, perfectly positioned on the map, and with directions working too. 10/10. (PS. ‘Italian Restaurant’, in full, also worked)

Vicinity: Only the top 15 matches are shown, with no ‘More’ button and no sub-categories underneath ‘Restaurants’. And no Italian restaurants were shown, it seems that Vicinity’s data sources favour Indian cuisine! 3/10.

Vicinity restaurant matches - spot a theme?

Vicinity restaurant matches - spot a theme?

AroundMe: Annoyingly, there are again no sub-categories. And only 10 matches. But at least there are a few Italian restaurants in the list, even though they’re not flagged as such. 5/10.

Test 3: Find me a hospital (I’m bleeeeding…..!)

Google Maps: A batch of hospitals and physio centres were picked up, with the biggest one shown first, thankfully. Some were close together, but a bit of multi-touch finger splaying was able to separate them easily. And route plotting was faultless too. 10/10.

Google Maps finding matches

Google Maps finding matches

Vicinity: Err… Blush. Hospitals apparently aren’t included. 0/10 again.

AroundMe: Ah, the penny drops. AroundMe is getting its data from Google. And the match list is therefore the same, but it’s next only and there’s no sense of atmosphere. And you have to drop out to Google Maps anyway, for mapping and directions. 7/10.

AroundMe finds The Royal Berskhire Hospital, thankfully...

AroundMe finds The Royal Berskhire Hospital, thankfully...

Test 4: Find me a cafe – I’m hungry

Google Maps: The local cafe (about a mile away) was correctly shown and routed to. 10/10.

Vicinity: No matches were shown in the ‘Cafes’ category. Disappointing. 1/10 – hey, at least there was a category of the right name.

AroundMe: There’s no ‘Cafe’ category, so I went for ‘Coffee’ instead. It couldn’t even get this right, missing out both the local cafe AND a ‘Costa’ coffee shop, also a mile away. 0/10.

____

Scores? Google Maps: 38/40. Vicinity: 4/40. AroundMe: 12/40.
I was surprised how poor Vicinity did. When it came out, I figured that it was a stroke of genius. But the strength of these applications is only ever as good as their data sources. In Vicinity’s case, the data sources seemed artificial, incomplete and biased. In AroundMe’s case, it seemingly can’t even ‘scrape’ Google’s matches properly.
And AroundMe also loses credit by not remembering its context. As you know, applications on the iPhone/iPod Touch can’t run in the background, so they have to close down when you press the ‘Home’ key and then start again when needed, hopefully remembering which screen and dialog you happened to be in. AroundMe doesn’t do this.
The overwhelming conclusion from this little test is that for general location-based information you really don’t need anything other than Google Maps. It’s a common misconception that Google Maps (on all platforms, whether iPhone or S60 or Windows Mobile or even on the desktop) is a mapping application. After all, that’s its name.
However, Google Maps is just a pretty mapping interface onto the core of the system, which is its worldwide databases of places, attractions, amenities, etc. This is growing and growing and becoming more complete as time goes by, and all backed by the big ‘G’ itself. And there’s no way that smaller developers can compete with that. Luckily, Google Maps is likely to remain absolutely free, so we, the general public, remain winners!