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.

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

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)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Chris M. on 2008-07-09 12:27 #2: scott on 2008-07-10 03:32
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry