Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

I recently purchased Ordinance Survey Ireland’s StreetSmart application for mobile phones and have been playing around with it. It has been pointed out to me that I could have used the Google Maps mobile application instead, but some of StreetSmart’s features appealed to me. Either way I desperately needed some mapping software because of my increasing reputation for getting lost!

The key features which appealed to me were the ability to:

Search over 10,000 street names and POI names with SMS - like text input.

Integrate with your smartphone’s camera to quickly and simply record photos and video clips onto the map.

The user simply has to enter in a street or attraction name and they can choose from a list of results. It’s simple to focus in or out of a map, making life a lot easier for someone like me to figure out exactly where they’re trying to get to. Here are a couple of samples:

Street Map

Magnified image

The real beauty however is the fact that you can click on attractions to get extra details. Here’s an example:

The OSI team have made it easy to personalise your own map, so it’s great to integrate telephone numbers or web addresses for restaurants, cinemas, etc.

My main gripe with the software though is the poor search function. The best way I can sum this up is when I searched for Pembroke Street, the only relevant result I got was Pembroke Lane. Thinking I must have mistaken the street name, I went to Pembroke Lane on the map only to discover that it runs off Pembroke Street. This is a pretty glaring error and I’ve had plenty of other incidents when the search function misfunctioned.

However the pros outweigh the cons and StreetSmart is a useful service overall. Given the price and the fact that the map is for Dublin only, if I were to make the decision again I would probably opt for Google Maps though.

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