No, I'm not forgetting that. I'm just not being clear. ;-)
I didn't want to suggest that ND (Nokia Drive) should look more like iOS or Google maps. I likely appreciate the simplistic and minimalistic approach just as much as you do. I'd also be completely against ND receiving more chrome. My point is, that minimalism and design aren't mutually exclusive, yet to my eyes, ND wasn't explicitly designed at all. I'd bet that ND was designed by programmers, not designers. I think a designer could do better. That is all I'm saying.
Despite appreciating simplicity, I also feel that the graphical rendering is sometimes too simple. For example, in night mode at large intersections, all the crossing roads can easily melt into a large and unidentifiable grey blob. This doesn't happen often in U.S. cities, as they tend to follow a geometric layout, but in European cities I see it quite often. All you can do is guess on which of those lanes that blue line actually lies. This is too simple. This is so minimal it compromises functionality.
And then there is the lack of polish. ND lunges from frame to frame at an unseemly 3 FPS. That is one of the issues I'd place in this category. Together with the lack of anti-aliasing.
Yes, agree. Yet this thread was made out to be all about the looks, not about functionality.
+10000
And this gets me back to the original intent of this thread - shouldn't Microsoft have made its own app? I don't care if they use Nokia's data, and I don't care if Nokia wants to develop Drive+ if they feel it offers something special. But with them basically relying on Nokia to supply this app, we have situations like non-Lumia users having zero decent options for navigation until Nokia got around to releasing it to them. And even then, like I and a few others here feel, they get an app that's good overall but has much less polish and lacks important features like rerouting based on traffic conditions. That's unacceptable if Microsoft wants to play with the big boys.