Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and today both Bing and Google released updates to their apps for Android I'm a google side it was their Google Maps app and on the big side it was the bing app for Android but what are they what can they do which one does what better let's go find out right now alright so Microsoft has updated their bing app for android and google has updated their Maps app for Android now showing you the differences between both of them in detail would just make for way too long a video and I know you don't want to see that so we're just going to kind of touch on some top level differences and then we're going to jump right into Maps because that's really where the big news centers around so first and foremost being installs one icon one app that's it Google on the other hand Google Maps installs not only the Maps app but also latitude navigation and places which are really just different views inside the Maps app so you don't have to download four separate apps it does all of them so these icons then become more shortcuts into specific areas of Google Maps the app now one thing not related to the Maps app is google search and this is running android 2.1 so it's not running the latest version of the google search widget so that's why it looks a little bit older but what this does is obviously it lets you search Google either using your keyboard or using your microphone so not part of the maps but that's the functionality that you get from bing so let's go ahead and jump into Bing over here we'll open that up it animates up shows you the the being logo and then loads what I like to call the being wallpaper and just like being the search engine it has these little hot spots that tell you information about the picture so just kind of interesting tidbits not really useful to what you're trying to do but informational about you know just being in general now when it opens up you see that it opens what I call the task tray now this is pretty much the same thing as Google separate apps over here it lets you search for other stuff and and customize things go into movies go into Maps go into local which local and places are the same maps and maps are the same directions and navigation are pretty much the same movies Google doesn't have a version for maps that that covers that and they don't have images but both of those are available through the google search itself so in a different place but still you're able to do that so let's go right into maps and show you the difference so here is bing maps and here is Google Maps 5 and over here I've got San Francisco California all queued up so let's go ahead and do that over here now we're both on Wi-Fi and I don't know if you saw that but here if we zoom out you can see I've got a grid that needs to be filled in and that's the way things used to be with Google Maps here you can see I can zoom out quite a bit and it loads up the grid quite a bit faster now the difference between the two grid styles this is still using bitmap grids meaning it's actually an image like a JPEG image or an actual bitmap image and every time i zoom it kind of scales those but then it has to pull in new tiles for me google used to have 256 x 256 grids now instead of just true bitmaps now they have what are called vectors and vectors are a lot faster than bitmaps they also require quite a bit less download size to get that information and it's just really really fast so we can come in here and zoom in all the way into San Francisco just really fast and I still have the vectors that were already loaded I just get more information and those vector tiles get a lot more precise the closer i zoom so if I do the same thing over here and zoom in and yes I could be doing a spread to zoom or using the zoom buttons but we'll just use the the double tap to zoom here so I can show you on both devices so here we are resumed in pretty much to the same area the Mission District here in San Francisco and you can see other than a little bit different style we get basically the same information but here's where things get different if I take two fingers over on Google five tap and pull down it tips my map down so that I'm seeing more of a 3d view if I do that over here in the zooms it doesn't know what to do because it doesn't have that 3d capability that this has now 3d is really where this is at so let's zoom in a little bit and we get more details oom it a little bit more and you can see all the buildings pop up that we showed you that in a prior video and it's really really cool and for some reason on the Samsung device here I can't rotate it like I would expect to be able to do on some of the other devices but we can't even rotate by the digital compass like you can with other devices don't know why that is but still very cool i can see all these buildings i can zoom in and get a lot more detail and as i scroll around it's just very very fast so really cool over on the Microsoft side I don't have that but I still do have the ability to zoom in and out and get the information that I need you'll notice i also have traffic information now i get traffic information on the other side as well so it's about the same thing it shows me where traffic is heavy so I can avoid those and that really comes into play when we are talking about navigating so let's jump right into nav okay so to get into navigation on bing maps we go to menu and directions it asks us where we want to start from and where we want to end so let's come over here to our endpoint and let's say San Francisco California if thinks about what I said recognize it and then we can hit go to do the same thing over here we're going to go into menu if we can remember where the where the menu button is on the samsung epic 4g and we're going to go to directions from directions we're going to go from my location to the end point for the end point we're going to choose san francisco california we could also have done a voice input there as well now one thing is right away we can choose we want to drive if we want to walk if we want to write a bike or if we want to take mass transit so we'll do a vehicle that's one thing that Google does really well is they've got mass transit and other options in there so here is how we drive to it and if you can see there are a little bit different ways that they have this presented here on google we have a turn by turn while this also has turn by turn but it kind of shows us an overview I like the overview a little bit better than the turn-by-turn but it's it's nice either way so let's go ahead and hit go and zooms in to our starting point if I hit the navigate arrow it launches over into google maps and navigation which is the nav side of google maps now navigations been using vectors for quite a while and it's something they really didn't out they didn't advertise but that's what to let you have a little bit more precise a little bit faster way to navigate through on the Google Maps Navigation side rather than the Bing side so let's talk about being for the time being so this gives me here I am and as I Drive it will update my position with that little dot and as I get to a new turn it will tell me what I need to do next so there's my next step my next step and on along my route now earlier versions of the app it would show you your point on the map but it would keep the the map tile centered so that was kind of lame the new version i don't believe does that it keeps the map centered around where you are so it's a little bit more useful but it doesn't have some of the advantages that Google Maps Navigation has all right so Google Maps Navigation is you've all seen this before so we'll just be really brief the first thing you've got is kind of this 3d tilted view it helps you see where you're going and realize kind of a better view of the roads and the turns that are that are coming up rather than the the Bing Maps version now up at the top you've got this nice little grain direction arrow it says hey in this direction in zero feet you're going to go straight that's because I'm not in my car otherwise i would say hey quarter mile turn right or five miles turn left you know whatever my next direction is so I know in advance which way I need to prep to turn it also shows me where I am now and where I'm heading so really nice really easy way to to see it also shows me down here on my route how long it's going to take and in this case I've got a green light meaning traffic from now through way down the road is green if I needed to I could tap on that and choose an alternate route that would get me around some traffic or some some backlogs and you can see wherever they have traffic data it's green I've got a little bit of a slow down over here in west wind over a little bit more over there so if i needed to choose another route I could do that really easy and quickly so really nice one thing that I do like is up here this green that looks just like the the freeway signs that show you upcoming exits and whatnot so the the travel metaphor you know the directional this is where you want to go is carried over into the app and it does that really well in my opinion so if I had to choose between navigating between Google Maps Navigation and Bing Maps well I don't think there's much of a comparison here now if I were looking for a full-featured everything in one app well-beings got it beat especially if you're looking up movies and whatnot that's really good over here on the other side Google is faster because it's got those vector images it seems to be a bit faster to load as well a bit faster to recognize directions so just all around a quicker experience and we're talking about phones that are pretty much the same speed so that's really not a you know a factor in how fast they are but it's interesting to look at the two different and really for running apps as far as maps and navigation go and see how well they do at everything they're both free they're both in the market and I recommend them both though I do lean a little bit more towards the Google Maps Navigation if you like Bing Maps better I'd like to know why and if you don't like Google Maps five I would also like to know why go ahead and leave us comments down below make sure you subscribe to our video channel so you can see more of these side by side comparisons so showing off google maps five versus the bing app for android i'm joe for pocketnow.com