Aug
Remember geography class at school? All those huge wonderful atlases full of interesting facts about far away countries, physical maps showing incredible geological features and demographic maps showing population distributions, all in one volume? The better atlases had extensive country and continent information from flags to natural resources, trade statistics and socio-political structures. The National Geographic has its own World Atlas HD available for the iPad, and if you want to access all the listed information in one place on the iPad, you’d do well looking elsewhere! World Atlas HD from National Geographic is simply rubbish. Of itself it has the intellectual depth of a fruit fly, and all the best features are imported from Bing. Come on, National Geographic: what are you playing at?
World Atlas HD offers 3 styles of map: Political, Satellite and ‘Executive’. For ‘Executive’ read, ‘Political-with-a-sepia-background’. The maps themselves are poorly detailed and rely on several slow and clunky zoom-ins to read anything at all. Once you get close enough in to read a map in any detail, the app switches to Bing, which the last time I looked was free… It’s a mystery to me why physical maps haven’t been included in this app. Exploring the Pacific’s ‘ring of fire’ or the mid-Atlantic ridge running the entire length of this ocean’s floor is beyond the scope of World Atlas HD. The maps themselves don’t look particularly HD, and zooming too quickly sometimes causes the app to crash.
Tapping and holding on a specific country brings up a window with useful country information including flag, demographics, economic and societal information. However, all this information is readily available using Wikipedia over your internet browser. Often Wikipedia’s database is more comprehensive than the information listed in World Atlas HD.
It’s a real shame that National Geographic have sullied their reputation with such as disappointing app. If you want a few pretty maps on an app then go ahead and buy World Atlas HD. However, if you want proper geographical information alongside comprehensive functionality, try Google Earth and Wikipedia!
World Atlas HD is available for $1.99 from iTunes
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