MVC Google Maps Website Demo feedback results – round 2

By candice

So my last investigation looked at how I could get my website rendering as a mobile website with a few CSS tricks. Following on from this I have a second round of feedback from my fellow colleagues using this demo site: http://demo.creative-jar.com/mvc-google-maps-mobile. Since my last post I’ve updated it with a couple of bits to see if it would help:

  • The CSS has been stripped back properly for mobile rendering (in case this could have had any possible cause for display issues)
  • I added the word ‘Loading…’ in my empty map <div> since this could have been causing a problem.
  • I added a <noscript> tag to the page so I could explicitly see if someone had javascript enabled or not in my feedback.

I resubmitted my demo site out and here are the results:

  • HTC Mozart | Windows Phone 7.5 | IE – latest version on WP7
    Outcome: Continues to perform well with geolocation enabled but the map flowed outside of the mobile design.

  • Blackberry Curve 8530 | BB O/S 5
    Outcome: Javascript was turned off. Map loaded once javascript was enabled but the map flowed outside of the mobile design. The geolocation was not supported and so the user was planted in Scotland. 

  • iPhone 4S | iOS 5 | Safari
    Outcome: Just showed the word ‘Loading…’ so looks like I need to consider doing some sort of mobile detection script here to reload the map in. 

  • Samsung Galaxy S II | Android | Google Android
    Outcome: Unsurprisingly, continues to perform perfectly. Cannot fault. 

When the site was run on the Blackberry we had a bit of a play with the settings, the first one we enabled was javascript location support. The next was general javascript support. After some testing we got the map to display, albeit incorrectly – over flowing the dimension of the <div> tag, but the geolocation failed. From my script it put my tester in Scotland which actually means that both the W3C Geolocation and Google Gears both failed. 

I also figured I would do some research into what platforms the Google Maps API actually supports and it turns out that it only supports iPhone and Google Android at present. I found this Google Group thread in which a Google Employee comments informally on the topic regarding Windows phones: http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3/browse_thread/thread/2e735d1347c9900a. So there may be some hope for Windows phones in the future, but as far as Blackberry OS and Symbian goes, you’re out of luck!

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