TUAW reported “There are quite a lot of posts on the Apple support forums discussing whether nor not the upgrade to iPhone OS 3.0 and later releases has trashed the GPS functionality of the device. At last count there were 24 pages, a high percentage from users in Europe who claim that moving to 3.0 eliminated GPS functions, and all they get is Wi-Fi geolocation or cellular network triangulation.
As often happens, the passion devolves to nasty comments going back and forth, but clearly, some people are having a GPS problem which Apple is not acknowledging as a bug. They are giving some people new phones, but others aren’t getting them because their iPhones are out of warranty.”
Here’s a typical comment from a customer in the iPhone Forums “”I could not get a satellite GPS (blinking blue dot) on my iPhone, while two other phones running 3.0 like me, got it within seconds. So I returned my unit, and got it replaced. The new phone got a correct GPS signal at once and according to MotionX GPS it was correct within 8 meters. “
This is something I see a lot, and people need to understand that sometimes the iPhone GPS gets somewhat confused. Here’s what I would recommend.
What a lot of iPhone customers fail to understand is that Google maps uses other technologies inside the 3GS, e.g the compass to track which direction you are moving in, and likewise it also uses AGPS more than other apps, which triangulates your position using cellphone towers. So when someone says “ah but Google maps works okay” it’s probably using AGPS or the iPhone 3GS compass to assist in navigation more.
