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GPS on the iPhone

posted by lxnyce on Wednesday June 11, @06:22AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the one-phone-to-rule-them-all dept.
The Map Room blog brings us some detail information about the new built in iPhone 3G gps functionality. I believe they're calling it AGPS, but here is an excerpt from their blog : "iPhone 3G uses signals from GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers to get the most accurate location fast. If GPS is available, iPhone displays a blue GPS indicator. But if you’re inside — without a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite — iPhone finds you via Wi-Fi. If you’re not in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, iPhone finds you using cellular towers. And the size of a location circle tells you how accurately iPhone is able to calculate that location: The smaller the circle, the more accurate the location."

For more information as well as some sample links, please visit the blog link above.

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...
The addition of cell tower positioning also increases availability so that users at least get a fallback location regardless of environment."


SkyHook also seems to be licensing its technology to chipset manufacturers, as reported here "CSR offers a Wi-Fi chipset and a Bluetooth/FM/software GPS chipset as well as its own eGPS software that reads cell tower signal to augment the GPS positioning."

Indoors or out, I can determine my position and not miss a beat (but might miss a little accuracy...)
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  • by SEWilco (1540) on Thursday June 12, @12:34PM (#2881)
    The GeoClue [freedesktop.org] tool is intended to make the same variety of location awareness available to any geo application on Linux. Instead of location-aware applications talking to a GPS software interface, they can talk to GeoClue which will use other methods if GPS is not available.
  • by tf23 (7) on Friday June 13, @11:09AM (#2883)
    If the GPS doesn't drain the battery on the iPhone as it does on my Garmin, this is going to be very cool. I don't carry my GPS around with me (I know, tisk tisk) but rather use it sparingly - on long road trips and/or hiking/biking.

    If it's built into my phone, I'd probably be more apt to use it for many more instances. And it'd be very handy, since I'd always have it then.

    Now all I need to do is get rid of this %^$#^$#^& crackerberry and purchase an iPhone :)