NaviGadget

GPS enabled phones not up to the task?

Jun 25, 2007 gps navigation, nokia, phones

In one hand we have people saying how stand-alone GPS navigation devices will soon be obsolete, since eventually all phones will have an embedded GPS chip, and in the other hand we have the state of the art Nokia N95 and Blackberry 8800 which do come with a GPS chip but can not deliver reliable GPS features.

Check out these people complaining about the fix time of their Nokia N95:

Robert Scoble says GPS on N95 sucks:

The GPS? Frustrating to use. You’ve gotta be outside and even then it takes several minutes to get a “fix”.

Since that’s one feature the iPhone doesn’t have, that tells me that Steve Jobs was probably smart in leaving GPS off of the iPhone.

A review on CNet also mentions not being able to connect to satellites:

However, we weren’t able to lock onto a GPS satellite for some reason during our test period — perhaps the areas we tested in didn’t have a clear enough view of the sky.

And lets look at Blackberry 8800 which is not as bad since it gets helps from cellular towers to get a fix.

This review mentions lack of available maps that don’t rely on cellular networks:

Make no mistake, though, you don’t need to see a cellular tower in order to get a GPS lock. Though in this case, it may not matter as much–without access to a cell tower for data service, there will be no maps from TeleNav, Google, or anything else but what’s already on the device, and to my knowledge there aren’t any cellular-independent mapping packages for the BlackBerry.

However you can still find very unhappy customers of GPS enabled Blackberry 8800:

So how does the GPS perform? Well, like the performance of the device itself, rather slowly. The built in software (Telenav) for GPS (which costs a monthly fee of $9 extra) has a nasty habit of taking a significant amount of time to get a fix before letting you even make use of the navigation features. I was very disappointed in the software’s inability to quickly get up and running. Having to wait up to 5 minutes just for the phone to get a GPS fix really limited the usefulness of the software for quick navigation tasks such as finding a local gas station or fast food restaurant.

(Note: Engineers at Nokia must have realized how bad the GPS performs so just recently the word came out that they’d be releasing a new firmware update for N95 to enable use of A-GPS)

So we believe there’s enough evidence to claim that GPS enabled phones are not up to the task of replacing standalone GPS navigation devices just yet. Their satellite fix times are slow, the maps need to be downloaded which can require a costly data plan.

There’s no need to throw away your Garmin, Mio, or Magellan just yet. If you are looking for a GPS integrated phone that delivers reliable GPS feature you may have to wait a bit longer. We can’t wait to hear about how the GPS functions on the new Mio A702 by the way – it uses SiRFDirect which may improve its performance.