I thought that I heard a lot of complaints from Blackberry users on GPS's effect on battery life. I guess it will be like WiFi/Bluetooth/SSH, its up to the user to turn it on/off. Are the rumors pointing towards an internal GPS? Or merely the ability to plug the iphone into a 3rd-party adapter and the phone will run the software.
Why is GPS so much better than the current Maps functionality? It always seemed to work great for me, even on my Touch. I suppose if I was hiking K2 or something I could see it being useful, but I probably wouldn't bring my iPhone!
Imagine you're the Queen. You want to get your driver to use his current iPhone google maps navigation, to pick up a sparkly new regal 3G iPhone from the shops. You can see the scale at the bottom, a rough 1 kilometre radius is shown from Buckingham Palace.
The point is, as the site Kdarling very well pointed out, there are limitations to the method google maps uses. Hence the use of any receivable wifi locations.
(helpful in the US too, courtesy of more Starbucks etc (you've got mail, and directions to cawfee...)).
It'd be A-GPS the iPhone would get I imagine, and if it got eGPS too, it'd have some good bonuses:
- Fast, more reliable, usable in low and no level GPS signal areas, where using the cell ID can give accuracy in 100s of metres.
eGPS uses the network info, a database of GSM/WCDMA basestation locations, a timing model of the network, etc, black bog
It's fallback worse position accuracy if it has a signal is ~<100m. So it's worst is better than google maps locate function currently most of the time.
Apple, Google have the smarts to dynamically change the rate of getting a position fix.
The impact on power consumption is almost negligible, as the cellular information is continuously derived via the handset's cellular modem, allowing the GPS subsystem to be powered up only when an accurate position fix is required. A typical eGPS push-to-fix will be available in less than 4 seconds, accurate to within 10m, and require the equivalent power of less than 1 second of handset talk time.
Seeing as it's already going to pop into the latest HTC Touch models (see more tomorrow), (headnod to kdarling) why can't Apple do the same?
It might add some price to the device, but as Jobs showed, you can sell the iPhone as a saving - how much would it cost to get all the devices separately (phone, ipod GPS, movie player etc etc).
There's a big market for people who'd use GPS, but don't want to fork out that much for it.
i'd really recommend hitting
http://maps.google.com/ searching for new york, zooming in, then having a play (or a large city of your choice).
Which of the 2 pictures for 5th Avenue New York Store as a snap shot of a GPS tells you that you have arrived?
I didn't even notice - it does linescale drawing of the buildings for added recognition. This is Google Earth for GPS in the making.
I'd really recommend checking out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgJSXrkwshg
and there's also this demo of how it'd look on the new 3G iPhone range
here If you're pretty pessimistic about it (these are rumours after all) - what will Android use?
