GPS For Smartphones Blows Away Standalone GPS Systems

Whenever I drive, I use my iPhone as my car’s GPS system. I have my iPhone chilling in an iPhone dock that’s installed onto the center of my dash where it gets power and the audio is connected via Bluetooth. I have Navigon running as the GPS app (decked out with all the extras) and Spotify running in the background for music. The GPS signal works so well and I can even have people use my iPhone in the backseat and the GPS still gives me directions.

But then I started thinking about non-smartphone GPS’s. I started thinking how horrible their GPS reception is. How you had to put the device up in the window with a perfect view of the sky if you wanted any hope of getting a “lock”, and even then most people use external GPS antenna’s to get the best connection. Even with a GPS antenna placed outside your car, there’d still be times you had trouble getting a lock. And how it takes 50 seconds to get a lock on a “cold start”?

Then, thinking back to the experience with the iPhone… you don’t gotta’ worry about any of that shit. Why? Because it uses A-GPS. A-GPS uses a “crappy” GPS receiver compared to standalone GPS devices, but it blends that in with crazy triangulation of cell towers and other mumbo-jumbo to give the iPhone like “super GPS”. I mean, it’s way beyond what any normal GPS device is capable of.

It takes like 10 seconds to get a GPS lock on a cold start and like 2-3 seconds on a warm start. When it comes to signal and reception, I can put my iPhone in my glovebox and close it up and it’ll still receive signal. Never drop signal driving around high rises, bad weather, you name it. In fact, even when I don’t have a cell signal, the GPS keeps on truckin’ like nothin’ happened.

Man, before switching to using a smartphone as my dedicated GPS, using top-of-the-line GPS systems weren’t 100% reliable mainly due to unexplained signal issues. It wasn’t isolated to a certain brand or model either. You’d be riding around, everything’s fine and all of the sudden you’d lose signal or your signal would get crazy out of sync (showing you completely off course). You’d wait and wait but the signal wouldn’t get fixed. You’d reboot your device (a HARD ASS thing to do, involving putting a pin through a pinhole in the back of the device). Sometimes shit would work again, but other times it wouldn’t. You’d never get a lock on. Sometimes it might last 10 minutes (a BIG deal when trying to navigate somewhere) and other times it just wouldn’t work.. like hours or even a whole day would go by before you could get a lock again. And when this happened, it wasn’t a “GPS global network is down”, no, it was just your device itself. Even reinstalling software or whatever wouldn’t fix it, it was just something to do with your device working with the GPS satellites.

So what you ended up with was this persistent fear that your GPS would stop working at the worst possible time, leaving you lost in a new area. The fear was real too. I lent my ride out to people and showed them how to work the GPS, even put in the address for’em, and it did its “rare” (ha-ha) signal loss thing. I’d get a phone call half way through their journey, telling me they had to pull over on the side of the road because they were now lost. Tried troubleshooting the issue with them, only to come to the conclusion the signal wasn’t coming back. That shit sucks, especially when you tell someone they can trust that the GPS will get them there safely.

Flash forward to the iPhone era and there ain’t that problem. (Well, at least not with a newer iPhone and Navigon.) I’ve setup numerous people with Navigon for their iPhone and I’ve never heard an issue come up do to GPS signal connections or anything like I mentioned previously.

When you think about it, GPS is remarkably complex and pretty fragile, it’s no wonder standalone systems have issues. I mean, they gotta’ synchronize with multiple satellites hovering in space. There’s no way a non-cellular connected, non-mobile Internet GPS system can compete. A-GPS is just far too advance. I’d like to be able to say that GPS has gotten more advanced over the years, but that’s not true. The technology’s changed; from GPS to A-GPS.

Things have changed so much from the days of spending $400-$500 dollars on a top-of-the-line GPS system. Now not only do I got my “car navigation system” in my pocket at all times, so does my girl, my mother, my friends, etc. Problems can still come up, like say my phone messes up for some reason and needs to be restored while we’re out someplace new; no problem, I just tell my girl “Yo, load up your Navigon.” and we don’t miss a beat.

Really, I’ll never go back to standard GPS again. JbB