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

If You Gotta’ Smartphone, Use It The Smart Way

Tonight I went to a comedy club. Me ‘n’ my girl had like an hour before the show started. So what did we do? In between talking to ourselves, we had our Glif propping up my iPhone 4 and we watched new TV episodes of shows we love on Hulu Plus, sharing earbuds. Really helped us enjoy the atmosphere and the time flew by. Other people around us were either extremely bored or were extremely impatient for the show to start.

We were the lucky ones, right? We had an iPhone and, thus, weren’t bored. Right?

Wrong. A couple sharing a table with us had an iPhone 4/4S. And either table to our sides, somebody had a smartphone. But they were as bored and impatient as the people without smartphones.

It’s all about what you do with your device the counts. The couple sitting at the table with us, the chick was on the iOS Facebook app. Anytime her phone was out, it was for Facebook. She also was boring her date showing photos of her “Facebook friends”. Literally, the dude was as zoned out as he was when her phone wasn’t out. But he showed a keen interest in what we were doing with ours.

See the difference here? My iPhone was completely superior to this chick’s iPhone, but not from anything physical. Heck, her’s could even be the newer model. Na, my iPhone is superior to hers because she wasn’t utilizing even a fraction of its potential. iPhones, and smartphones in general, have fantastic two player games, access to numerous streaming video sites (both free and premium), trivia, goofy apps, all this stuff that can keep people entertained.

Utilizing your device’s potential can literally make the difference in your day-to-day life. And it don’t gotta’ require crazy preparation. No “Well yeah, if I knew the wait would be this long, I’d be prepared like you.”. No, that’s the point of smartphones is that since they’re always with you, you don’t gotta’ plan somethin’ special. Just bring your headphones and your set.

Think about all the unplanned boring situations you can be placed in. Now just remember you’ve got a device to keep you completely entertained (or productive or whatever), IF you use it right. Serious? Facebook? Damn that shit’s boring. If you truly got a smartphone, then use it the smart way. Otherwise, you’ll just be one of many that’ll look at someone like me with envy like “Damn, I wish I had a phone like his.”. JbB

My iPhone 4’s Mic Won’t Switch To External Mode No More

This means that I can’t do speakerphone or record audio for videos or do my awesome Talking Carl. There’s something physically wrong inside my phone that’s causing the mic to stay on the “hold the phone up to your face to speak” mode. It ain’t software as I’ve done a complete reset of all data and the phone still does it. Didn’t happen from damage or nothing as it happened one day just chilling on my desk, one hour the speaker phone worked and the next it didn’t.

What are my options? Well I took my phone to the Apple store, which is (of course) still under contract, and they said they wouldn’t do shit because it’s out of the one year warranty. When I mentioned that numerous people got their phones fixed after warranty if they were still within their two-year contract if the problem effected normal operation of the phone, then they mentioned they’ll do that “30 days out of warranty”.

I’m too early to get an iPhone 4S (which I really don’t want to, I want to wait for the iPhone 6, aka “iPhone 5”), so I could either pay the half-upgrade price (my iPhone 4 is a 32 GB, so an iPhone 4S 32GB would cost $549!), pay $150 for Apple to fix the problem… or pay a local company to fix the issue (which I doubt they’d even know where to look).

None of those options really work for me. And for those who think buying Apple Care is a smart thing and would “prevent” this issue, it wouldn’t. You’d pay $99 up front and then pay $50 for a “complete replacement!”. So $150 total? The same price I’d have to pay? No, Apple Care’s a waste of money.

What’em I gonna’ do? Shit… I’m just gonna’ try to live with it until the end of this year when I can upgrade to the next model. Upgrading to an iPhone 4S so late would really screw things for me. And if anything, I’d want to get a 64 GB (because of the increase in video and photo files), so that shit would be just too damn expensive without a full upgrade. Na, it’ll either be an iPhone 6 32 GB or 64 GB or nothin’ at all. JbB