MVC Google Maps Website Demo feedback results – round 1

By candice

My colleagues at Creative Jar have very kindly taken the time to view my demo website and given me the much needed feedback covering the big 4 platforms on the market today. The only OS not covered below is Symbian but that is now in decline with Nokia’s decision to drop it, therefore for the purposes of this exercise I’m not going to worry about that one too much despite it’s still fairly widely used at present.

Each piece of feedback contained the make and model of phone, OS and browser as well as the outcome of viewing the Google Map page on the site:

  • HTC Mozart | Windows Phone 7.5 | IE – latest version on WP7
    Outcome: Accurate when GPS allowed and it displayed the web page as it would in a desktop browser, retested without GPS and denied access.

  • Blackberry Curve 8530 | BB O/S 5
    Outcome: Failed to load the map - just a blank screen

  • iPhone 4S | iOS 5 | Safari
    Outcome: Failed to load the map – just a blank screen

  • Samsung Galaxy S II | Android | Google Android
    Outcome: When browser location sharing switched on the location was accurate and it displayed the web page as it would in a desktop browser. Retested without browser location sharing and was denied access.

The HTC Windows 7.5 phone and Samsung Android phone performed perfectly, rendering the website without issue and gave excellent geolocation accuracy. The Windows phone used GPS for the positioning so was naturally very accurate. The Android phone didn’t have GPS enabled on the phone and simply used the location sharing naturally available through the GSM/3G service. This was accurate to within around 10 metres which was comforting given that not everyone wants to enable their GPS service that could cost them GPS data fees.

The Blackberry was also somewhat unsurprising given that by default Blackberry has javascript disabled – the language with which the Google Maps API communicates. I do need to get this confirmed though since it was not communicated whether javascript was enabled or not. It could of course be a similar issue to the iPhone.

The iPhone however was the big surprise. A blank screen? The page did load but no map? This was most odd but to me felt like this could be a CSS issue given that to render the Google Map you are essentially rendering an empty <div> tag.

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