Quote:
Originally Posted by OICURMT
My missus wasn't using maps services, just trying to record Lat/Long's into a trip journal app, nothing more. My Blackberry's GPS worked without any problems at all. I just grabbed all the locations and e-mailed them to myself (held in the outbox until I could get a cell signal several days later) and presto... then I had to manually enter the coords into a textfile for uploading into her journal on the iPhone.
Anyhoo, hopefully the 4 is more "Magical" and allows the GPS to work regardless of whether Location Service is on or off, or with flight mode.
I wasn't aware that TomTom had an app for the iPhone, I'll go check it out.
|
Ok so I've looked more into this. Yes the iphones have assisted GPS, but that doesn't mean they need a network connection (optus, telstra etc). The GPS will work with no sim card. There are several reasons why it may not work for you. Its best to set your home and timezone correctly for the country you are in, otherwise the phone won't know what satellites to look for. Another more obvious possibility is that location services were not turned on for that specific program.
Tom tom state that their mapping program works without a network connection.
The other possibility is that you didn't wait long enough. The iphone uses cell towers to get its original lock and speed up location acquisition. There are reports of iphones with no cell connection taking up to 15mins to acquire a good lock (although it should be faster).
I'm not defending iphone GPS, to be honest its a bit lame, but works.
As for having GPS in "flight mode", that makes no sense. The idea of flight mode is to turn off all radio devices, that includes GPS.
It sounds like your iphone GPS didn't work on one occasion and now you're convinced all iphones never work without cell connection.
I've recorded my long/lat while bushwalking in Lamington National park where I certainly didn't have cell access. This was using Motion X app.
Everyone seems to think A-GPS is a bad thing... but really its just adding another feature to GPS, not limiting it. I think where the iphone falls down a bit is in its software utilisation of the iphone GPS hardware. The GPS could be better and respond better but Apple have implemented some strange software regarding GPS use which is designed to maintain battery life. Therefore it will use an many other methods of location acquisition first to narrow down roughly the position then focus in using GPS for the shortest time possible. When using the phone for basic things it works really well. However when you confuse it by going to another country and have no cell connection it doesn't cope too well.
But saying all this, GPS should work for you if you have no cell connection.