Comment by sexy_seedbox
9 days ago
Why didn't you use Kakao Maps or Naver Maps? They're not shotty and work just fine, even if you don't read Korean, you can quickly guess the UI based on the icons.
9 days ago
Why didn't you use Kakao Maps or Naver Maps? They're not shotty and work just fine, even if you don't read Korean, you can quickly guess the UI based on the icons.
I tried both and the lack of an English UI made a lot of it non-unintuitive, especially when it came to search and finding local businesses walking around. There were some other annoyances, like when I travel for leisure I enjoy researching an area ahead of time bookmarking places to overlay on a map, and being able to organically explore the area as I move around. I found that very difficult on Naver (I don’t recall the details but I know being able to search for types of businesses in English was part of the issue).
I believe performance wise it was also pretty sluggish from what I remember. I’m by no means saying it was unusable, it got me through somewhat functionally but with a lot of extra effort on my behalf. I also had an international data plan and wasn’t able to see if I could precache the map set vs streaming it as needed over wireless.
I often like to look at restaurants, menus, prices, reviews as well to scope out a place quickly before going there. That process was also tedious (to be fair it could be that I’m not familiar with the UI).
The question is why did I have to use Naver or Kakao in the first place. I’d rather just use the system I already enjoy and am quite proficient with using it, not be forced to play with some new app that I need useful information from for some unclear reason.
Agree, Naver maps for navigating public transit in Seoul is excellent. Easier to figure out than public transit in any American city I've been to and I don't read or speak Korean. iirc it even tells the fastest routes/best carriage to be on to optimize transferring between lines.