Wednesday, July 9. 2008

Pogue on iPhone GPS

The New York Times tech guru is not impressed:

The new iPhone has true G.P.S. now, too, in addition to the fake G.P.S. of its predecessor — an ingenious system that shows your location on a map by analyzing nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in GPS, Apple at 06:00 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Did anyone else see the discussion board at the last ESRI conference about the GIS certificate being a false industry standard? I am starting to agree with that posting. Increasingly I am seeing first hand people with the P after their name who can hardly open arcmap let alone tell you how many files make up a shapefile. Perhaps this certificate program needs a good second look before it establishes itself as a 'standard

#1 Chris M. on 2008-07-09 12:27 (Reply)

When you can track your position with the GPS you can also do turn-by-turn navigation. Maybe the GPS chip is not very strong, but this means you can not use any application that require the GPS.

For the iPhone users I just hope that those applications not only depend on the GPS for positioning, but also use the system that shows the location on a map by analyzing nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots.

#2 scott on 2008-07-10 03:32 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Chris M. on 2008-07-09 12:27 #2: scott on 2008-07-10 03:32
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