iPhone 3G GPSr performance?

Having upgraded my iPhone to a shiny new 3G one yesterday mainly for the
GPS receiver, I'm now wondering whether my unit is broken as so far it
hasn't managed to get a GPS lock at all. I first tried it in the house
in positions where my N95 8GB gets a lock easily, and I've tried it in
the garden where I would expect it to have no trouble at all. I intend
to try it in various (outdoor and in the clear) locations whilst out
and about today.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong....?

In "Settings - General" I have "Location Services" turned on. In the
Maps application I press the cross-hairs button in the bottom-left
of the screen and see the usual rotating wait-cursor. Then I wait,
wait a bit more, wait a while longer, and after that do a bit more
waiting. Nothing happens. The rotating thing carries on rotating for
several minutes until the iPhone gets bored and goes back to standby.

On my v1 iPhone, without a GPSr, pressing the same button would reasonably
soon show a circle on the map, supposedly containing my position, but
on this one I don't get a circle at all.

How does this compare with the experience of other iPhone 3G GPS users?

Thanks,

Mark.

On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:42:19 +0100, markt@kram.org () wrote:


When I first opened Google Maps it asked me if I wanted to let Google
Maps have access to location services. It asked me this twice when I
first used it and doesn't ask anymore but works. Gets a reasonable
lock in about 15 secs or less (faster than any GPS device I've used,
even aGPS on my n95)

Open the Camera app - that also asks if you want to let it have access
to location data (to EXIF location data in photos).

Mine worked perfectly out of the box. It even guided me all the way
back home from work yesterday.


They have some suggestions and the same problems as you.
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Thanks very much. The hints there, i.e. temporarily turn off auto-lock
and use the Where application, did the trick. I can now get a lock indoors
too in positions where I'd expect the N95 8GB to get a lock.

Cheers,

Mark.

p.s. The Maps application in it's current form is NOT going to make
me switch away from Tomtom for navigation. It has a lot of catching
up to do. I hope Apple let Tomtom (and others) deploy their navigation
applications on the iPhone.
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **

The runes do not look good, Tomtom appear to have stopped making
software-only releases and are only doing hardware now. They'll still
sell you the software but it's on version 6 whereas the devices are on
version 8. It won't even support the N95 internal GPS. I'd have
thought an iPhone release is extremely unlikely given that it's the
only phone to use that OS so the market is very small.

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It can take up to half an hour to get a first fix from a cold start, even on
something not made by Apple.

After the first time the phone remembers where it was switched off and it
takes 30s if you are unlucky. OTOH fly to Cape Town, with it switched off
and it may take a while to reaquire.