Yesterday, Apple seeded iOS 6 Beta 4 to developers. It features a bunch of tweaks throughout the OS and its included apps, removes YouTube* as a stock app, and now, we’ve learned that Apple has added new cities from North America and Europe to its Maps app’s 3D feature. Check out the details after the jump.
Announced as part of iOS 6 at WWDC 2012 in June, the all new Maps app ditches Google Maps in favor of their own mapping solution which they cooked up after acquiring mapping-related companies like C3 Technologies, Placebase and Poly9. Besides offering the long-demanded turn-by-turn navigation (voiced by Siri), Maps for iOS 6 come with an awesome 3D mode which show a highly detailed 3D view of selected cities like Chicago, Sacramento, Denver, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Las Vegas, and Sydney to name a few.
Now, Apple has increased the list of supported cities. The new cities include:
- USA: Boston, New Orleans, Houston, Portland, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Dallas, Atlanta
- France: Lyon
- England: Birmingham, Manchester
- Canada: Toronto
The 3D mapping technology used for these cities comes from C3 Technologies which has data for cities like Venice, London, Barcelona, Milan, Oslo, and Prague. You can expect 3D Flyover mode to be enabled for these cities in the future too.
3D Flyover and turn-by-turn navigation in iOS 6 Maps only works on the iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and the new iPad. The limitation of 3D flyover for older devices like the 3GS and, to a certain extent, the iPhone 4 is understandable, but not including turn-by-turn navigation will be a big disappointment for folks with older iOS devices. This is just Apple’s way of pushing you to get a new iOS device.
We have a feeling though that the jailbreak community will somehow manage to enable the two features when iOS 6 releases this fall alongside the new iPhone.
If you want to try out the new Maps application, you can go ahead and try out the latest beta of iOS 6 – Beta 4 – by downloading it from the iOS Dev Center. This only works if you paid $99 to become a registered developer, of course.
iOS 5 took 7 betas before it reached Golden Master status. With several weeks between today and the expected new iPhone announcement, we expect at least two more iOS 6 betas to come out before it is finalized for public release.
(via 9to5Mac)
You may also like to check out:
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the Web.
