NaviGadget

iPhone ready for GPS

Apr 22, 2008 gps navigation, phones, software

It looks like Apple is readying iPhone for GPS support. The device emulator included with iPhone SDK for application developers includes hints that the company has added support for GPS to the platform. We have no way of telling whether this would be an add-on device, an embedded GPS chip, or an A-GPS chip from Qualcomm but whatever it is the software is ready for it:

As discovered by user Steffen Voigt, the locationd component of the current iPhone emulator includes references to NMEA. NMEA is a data specification for communication between various location sensing devices, particularly GPS units.

locationd also makes direct references to satellite-gathered information, with strings mentioning satellite status, latitude, speed, magnetic variation, etc. Other strings mention GPS time, type, position and accuracy… iphoneatlas