Just outside the manually saved offline region (indicated by the horizontal line in the third image, above), Android Maps degrade into an unusable blur just 40 miles away from our location. Apple's automatically cached offline maps gracefully scale down in detail to remain useful, a much better implementation of vector map technology.
To capture greater detail of specific areas for offline use in Apple's iOS 6 Maps, all you have to do is zoom in on the regions you want to view offline. After zooming into street level maps in Fairfield, Santa Cruz, Antioch and Sacramento, the new Maps allowed us to zoom back in at the same level of detail to all those areas once offline.
Additionally, Android Maps will not allow you to bring up its layers menu without a data connection, making it impossible to try to load satellite images or a hybrid view for offline use, even for areas captured with the Offline Maps feature.
If Google's latest version of Android Maps is any indication of what it will offer iOS users, it needs to put a lot of work into its vector maps imaging to catch up to Apple's technology in Maps. At the same time, we'd like to see official support for saving offline maps of specific areas within iOS 6 Maps, because it's not clear how long or how much detail Maps saves for you after you've browsed a region.
There's no doubt that the "automatic offline support" in Apple's new Maps is infinitely better than the old iOS 5 Maps, however. It's also surprising that Apple hasn't made available for sale specialized packages of offline maps, such as national parks or regional trails, hiking and camping maps, and similar detailed, offline maps for iOS 6 users.
In addition to better handling of offline maps, Apple uses its new vector maps to progressively reveal detail on the map, as the next segment details.