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

Consumer Innovation Trumps Business Innovation

What’s really funny here is the fact that these companies are wanting to adopt iPads (the article says “tablets”, but come on, it’s iPads) and are leading the change rather than their IT departments. 

Small and mid-sized businesses planning tablet buying spree

This… this… is what I love about this new “consumer-based” technology revolution. Never before in the history of computers has there been this kinda’ movement, and it’s exactly the kind of movement that I like seeing. 

No longer do you have business and IT assholes dictating what the rest of the world uses… devices they dictate we, the everyday person, will use long after they’ve been using them and have moved onto the next generation technology. It used to be CEO’s and CTO’s (chief technology officers) of major, pretentious Fortune 500 companies drove where innovation and technology was headed. They, and the IT industry, created a class-warfare type of divide between big business users and everyone else. Big business used to idolize companies such as IBM and later RIM (Blackberry). These tech companies catered to their enterprise segments and really treated their consumers as second-class citizens. 

The poster child for this type of scenario is embodied best by RIM and their Blackberry. This was a company that rose to power fast by giving Fortune 500 managers and IT departments exactly what they wanted: elitism and prestige for the managers and control and complexity for the IT techs. Blackberrys were extremely expensive and their service very costly… unless you bought in bulk and dedicated your entire infrastructure to their technology. This ensured that only the biggest of big companies could afford Blackberrys. In time, RIM created lower-end Blackberrys for your average working person and later consumers, but they were cheap, crappy, overpriced devices. See, CEO’s and CTO’s wouldn’t have been happy if their workers got devices with the same capabilities as them.

This power trip among those in control created a working environment that was hostel towards intuitiveness, simplicity and innovation. Just four to five years ago, nearly all Fortune 500 companies had a strict policy that no emails could be accessed on any mobile device unless it was a Blackberry. Workers were stuck with some of the WORST laptops, IBM’s and their God-awful little eraser head pointer devices, because their CEO’s and CTO’s insisted they were the best laptops.

Workers, consumers and small businesses developed a resistance to change because it was never positive change for them but was always a positive change for someone else (namely the IT department). This became the normal for, what… 20 years? Consumers were left with inferior products while big business dictated the path of innovation (or lack-there-of). 

But then something changed… it all started with the iPhone, a device not only far, far superior to anything big business was using, but a device targeted towards the everyday person and not the business-ruling elite! CEO’s and CTO’s thought of it, and Android phones, as nothing but a toy. But people started buying their own iPhones and started using them for work instead of their company-issued Blackberrys. That’s when things started to change. Soon the CEO’s were using iPhones and Androids and only the CTO’s were the ones left crying bloody murder… well them, and RIM.

Then the iPad was introduced and that changed up the mindset for millions, if not billions, of people. Now, anyone with $500, from a housewife to a college student to a CEO could possess a device that, just a few years ago, should have only been reserved for the business elite. 

This is now where your seeing real innovation happen in business. No longer is business innovation limited to companies grossing millions of dollars but to whoever has the best ideas and who’s willing to take risks. That’s why, even though hospitals ARE adopting iPads at a brisk pace, you got the article above that talks about small clinics taking charge in innovation. 

Damn I love the period of history we live in, in a technological perspective. I typed this entire blog post while chillin’ in bed, on the same device (my iPad) that this article talked about leading innovation. I hope we never move from consumer-led innovation ever again. JbB