“After first being promised in October, then being delayed into November, Apple has finally rolled out iOS 6 Map’s turn-by-turn voice navigation functionality to its users in Australia,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac.
“Responding to a customer email in September regarding the feature’s availability in Australia, former Apple Senior Vice President of iOS Scott Forstall said that the data needed to be exceptional and qualified before the on switch was flicked,” Gurman reports.
Read the comments below the full article to see how Apple’s done with Maps Down Under here.
MacDailyNews Note: Oy, Aussies, how ya goin’, mates?
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
I’m confused, i live in Australia and this feature has been working since iOS 6 was released – though the data was not very accurate as for the street numbers. Maybe withheld 6.1 release that is improved…
Confused here across the Tasman also. Turn-by-turn has worked in NZ for some time. Still some big mistakes in the data though.
Apple juice keeps we Aussies goin’.
Doin’ just fine thanks. Even better now with turn by turn voice nav. 🙂
Australia rocks man. I was there near Brisbane (Surfer’s Paradise) in 1991 working at the Warner Roadshow Studios shootin’ a movie and boy was it great. Flew up to Port Douglas for a little vacation and it was awesome. From accommodations to the tropics to the food to the Great Barrier Reef yah got some country there mates! (Some great looking women too.)
Don’t patronise us you wanker ;o)
That’s a bit rough.
This is in reference to voice-guided turn by turn navigation, which wasn’t available when iOS 6 was launched in Australia.
What we had before was just turn by turn on the display, without any voice guidance.
Tried it this morning and worked really well. Re-routed very quickly (a few seconds) when I deviated from the route for traffic and/or local knowledge reasons and gave plain English driving instructions such as “use the roundabout to make a U-turn” and “make a slight left turn” which were the perfect descriptions at the time versus the generic “veer left” which Navigon uses across all kind of different road configurations, including sometimes some quite sharp turns.
Used 12% of battery over a 55-minute drive.
Oh, I’m in Sydney and used it to drive from Eastern Suburbs out to Homebush including a fair few back streets as shortcuts.
Just gave it whirl and worked great. To parrot one of the other commentors, it rerouted very quick. Nice to have it on.
Just tried it North of Brisbane. Flawless. Better than Tom Tom.
Do they have to turn their iDevices upside down to read the maps properly?
No, we stopped doing that in about 1920, a hundred years after that joke got old
Hi. Phil from Canberra here. FINALLY it’s been enabled. I’ve been checking every few days for this. I’ll have to try it out tonight.
It’s weird, but I think they’ve gone back to using the old map data from google or wherever. A lot of the dirt roads around where I live have gone again. When they switched over to Openmaps data my road came up in the new Maps app. Now it’s gone back to the crap google data. Look up Baroona road, Michelago, australia in both http://www.openstreetmap.org/ and google maps.
Google maps is crap off road in australia. That’s why I was so glad when Apple ditched their data and went with OpenMaps data. Open maps has user contributed data so you can fill in the gaps yourself. Look around the district in both maps, lot more roads in Openmaps.
Wish i had kept a that screenshot i took showing my road in Maps, which is now gone again according to google.
Lot of dirt roads in Australia, well, not according to Google 😉