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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

If the only nice thing you can say about a phone is the camera and how it feels, not to mention devote at least 2 paragraphs to how pedantic Apple is about design and it paints a familiar picture. Apple are losing at their own game, the game they started and now a game that others are finishing for them.

The only great thing about the new iPhone is the fact that the iOS 6 operating system is comes with has an awesome vector maps feature that blows Google Maps out of the water. I'm not prepared to spend $1000 AUD on buying an iPhone 5 when it doesn't offer anything significantly new, where's the NFC chip?

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NFC is nearly useless at this point and there is a possibility it will never become ubiquitous. I don't see NFC being a huge selling point outside of the techies fpr quite some time.

Well, if only NFC had a big backer and became much more popular.. then maybe merchants would use it. A backer like, you know Apple?

Using that same argument, maybe Apple will create some sort of Bluetooth-based payment system.

So, you are saying that Samsung and Nokia aren't popular enough?

Samsung and Nokia are popular enough and have the resources to back NFC but as of now they haven't done anything besides launching phones with the technology.

NFC today is just a dummy selling point and they know it, because they haven't done anything to make it popular.

This is basically where Bluetooth was in, say 2003. People are disappointed because Apple is generally forward-looking when it comes to standards and tech, but has shied away from NFC (which shouldn't be surprising given their stance on USB3.0 and Blu-Ray).

Nearly useless except at McDonald's, 7-11, CVS, Foot Locker, American Eagle, Jamba Juice, some Starbucks......

Not everybody lives in the US, you know. In Europe we have NFC in our credit cards. You put your wallet close to the register, write your PIN, and pay. Few small stores support NFC, though.

I'm not saying that's the reason why Apple ditched NFC, but maybe we would need an independent study on actual stores which support NFC and consider if whether it's a useless standard. You're gonna carry your wallet anyway to pay in cash, why not put the NFC in the credit card?

In Australia credit cards and debit cards come with a wireless contact chip inside of the card as standard. I hardly see how NFC is useless, maybe in the US it is, but in Australia and New Zealand as well it certainly has a commercial use.

Google Maps has had navigation since November 2009[1]. Google released vector maps with 3D rotation and 3D buildings and offline caching in December 2010[2].

Apple is coming to the party one year and nine months late. Have you used Google Maps on an Android device lately?

I'd also point out that Google Maps has a significantly larger database of points of interest than Apple, who is relying upon a TomTom database.

I don't see any reason why the Apple Maps application would "blow Google Maps out of the water." Google's been doing maps for a really long time so a v1.0 release of a maps app from Apple is not going to destroy the behemoth that is Google Maps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps [2] http://www.cnet.com.au/next-google-maps-has-3d-vector-maps-o...

Google maps on Android have been vector maps for more than a year.

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