Category: General Posts

We were gifted a Garmin GPS for Christmas this year.  It’s quite nice.  Here are a few short notes about it in comparison with the GPS of the iPhone 3G…

Accuracy
The Garmin GPS unit has greater accuracy than the iPhone by about 5 feet from what I can tell.  That’s not too big of a deal but the other noticeable thing was that it updates significantly faster that the iPhone GPS.  It has no problem locating you while you are on the move, even at highway speeds.  This is my biggest complaint with the iPhone GPS which I wrote about previously.  I imagine this is because the Garmin unit provides more power to it’s GPS chip.

Connectivity
The Garmin doesn’t require internet connection for the maps.  They are already on the device.  This is good and bad.  It’s good because it doesn’t matter if you are in range of a cell phone tower.  You can still view the maps.  It’s bad because you only get what’s on the device and it will eventually get outdated.  Garmin charges for the map updates so that’s a big bummer.  In contrast, the iPhone is always up to date and you’ll never pay for the maps since they are pulled from google.

Usability/Interactivity
The user experience on the Garmin is designed to be very simple but it uses some out-of-the-ordinary conventions.  The biggest issue I have experienced is the data entry.  The keyboard layout is a big alphabetic block.  It’s very different from a traditional keyboard.  I find it clunky because it is so much different than the qwerty keyboards that I’m used to on other mobile devices.  The iPhone keyboard is smooth and natural.  It’s offers a much faster method for data entry.

The Garmin defaults to a 3D view of your car on the road.  It speaks to you and tells you when you are about to come up on a turn.  It also automatically recalculates directions if you miss a turn.  The iPhone follows you but if you miss a turn it doesn’t take any corrective action.

Conclusion
The the Garmin is built specifically as a navigation device and it performs it’s primary functions very well.  It appears that the GPS features were kind of an after thought on the iPhone.  It’s level of design is not up to par with other Apple products I’ve used.  If you are looking for a GPS unit, don’t expect the iPhone to compare with the Garmin devices out there…   at least, not yet.  The beauty of the iPhone however, is that it recieves free periodic updates that improve features and user experience.

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I’ve been in Oregon and Washington for about a week on hiking trails and lakes.  I’ve been using the GPS on my iPhone as much as possible.  I have read that the GPS uses cell phone towers as well as satellites to triangulate your position.  It’s been a true test of the quality of the GPS chip because most of the time while on trails I haven’t had a cell phone signal.  I’ve discovered a few things about the iPhone maps application and the GPS quality.

Pre-cache Map Tiles
The maps app will cache map tiles for areas that you visit while you have a data connection.  When you are out of range the map will still be displayed.  I imagine that there is a limit to how much storage the maps application can use for cached tiles.  If you plan on taking advantage of cached map tiles you may want to consider viewing maps at more than one zoom level.  I’ve discovered that one close up view and one far away view will usually suffice.

Latitude and Longitude
What if you know the coordinates of a location you wish to get to but you don’t know the path or you can’t find it on the map?  We wanted to locate a few waterfalls on the map before visiting so that the maps would be cached.  You can enter the latitude and longitude coordinates into the maps application to look up the location on the iPhone.  An example would be “48.1188 N, 123.4278 W” (the Red Lion in Port Angeles, WA).

GPS Locator Depends on Speed
I discovered that it is usually unable to locate me when I’m traveling faster than about 5 MPH.  While I can understand why this might be, it is still a real pain to have to stop the car just so that the GPS can find me on the map.  Once it has initially located me it has no problem following me at 70 MPH.  Seems inconsistent to me.

Altitude
The free application TrackThing available on the app store has been really cool as it has been able to provide fairly accurate latitude, longitude and altitude.  It also graphs this information over time.

Thoughts
If you were planning on buying the iPhone 3G for the GPS functionality you might be better looking at a traditional GPS unit.  While it’s really nice to have the GPS built in to your phone/camera/entertainment device, there has really only been one time this entire week when it was able to find us that was really helpful.  It was cool to look up our altitude when we were sitting on top of Hurricane Ridge though.

Does it really work?  The short answer is YES with a few buts… in there.  You can use T-Mobile on your iPhone 3G.  Before I bought one I was skeptical.  I would read online that the iSmartphone 2008 X-Sim works and then 2 paragraphs down in the comments someone would confirm that it doesn’t work.  I hope to help clear this up a little for those who are new to the iPhone 3G or looking to get one.

The main reason that people want to use T-Mobile or some other provider over AT&T is that it’s significantly cheaper.  Say nothing about the horrible customer service you may experience with AT&T.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can read about my experience with buying a few iPhone 3Gs on a family plan.

With an unlocked iPhone you can install a small hack (TZones) which allows you to use the T-Zones data plan ($5.99/Month) as an unlimited data connection.  I have a brother and a good friend who both did this on the first generation iPhone.  This is a big draw and one of the main reasons consumers don’t want to be chained to a provider when they buy a phone – especially one as expensive AT&T.

So what works?

Option 1 – Lesser Known Providers
Well, if you are afraid of hacks, you could go this route:  At the time that I purchased my iPhones my cell phone service was through Consumer Cellular.  The great thing about them is that they offer month to month plans at a significantly discounted rate compared to AT&T but they piggy-back on AT&T’s network.  I was pretty psyched when I put my Consumer Cellular sim card in my iPhone 3G and it worked!  So option 1 is to find a low cost provider that uses the AT&T network.  Here is a list of USA wireless service providers.

Option 2 – Sim Card Hack
I fully expected to have to use this method to unlock my iPhone so it was a nice surprise to find out that Consumer Cellular just worked.  The major drawback was that they didn’t offer data plans.  I used the WIFI on my phone when at home and at work for an internet connection.  I was blown away by how often I actually used the internet on my phone.  The web browser on the iPhone is the first mobile web experience that’s actually worth talking about (nice work Apple).  The only major flaw with it is that there is no flash player (um…   duh Apple?).  Since I use the internet so much on my iPhone now, I decided to start looking at T-Mobile so I could get a data plan.  Edge is the data network that both AT&T and T-Mobile use.  It’s not quite as fast as 3G but it’s fast enough to do what you need most of the time.  In my post on unlocking the iPhone 3G you can get instructions and see pictures of how I did it.  I used the iSmartphone 2008 X-Sim.  It worked perfectly until Apple released the 2.1 firmware update for the iPhone.  After installing it, I was able to get phone service, voicemail and text messaging but was unable to get data a connection to the Edge network.  I’ve ordered a new X-Sim that claims to work on the 2.1 firmware and doesn’t require you to cut your original sim card.  We’ll see if that works.

So the benefit is that you should be able to use any GSM provider using this method.  The drawback is that it might stop working as new firmware gets rolled out and data features may not work depending on the sim hack that you buy.  Of course you have the option not to install the new firmware.

Option 3 – Water The Money Tree
I sold a few of these phones on eBay for a profit and I noticed that there were several others selling for well over $1000.  The difference was that these phones were legally and officially unlocked by Apple only to be sold in other countries.  I wasn’t willing to pay that kind of money for one.

Option 4 – Wait
The iPhone Dev Team is always hacking away on the iPod Touch and iPhone.  It is possible that they will eventually find a hack for the baseband frequency on the iPhone 3G as they did with the first generation iPhones.  If that happens, you will be able to PWN your iPhone using the Pwnage Tool or WinPwn.  This is a very simple process that requires very little technical skill.  After Pwn’ing your iPhone, it will be unlocked to any GSM provider without an extra sim card hack.

When my new X-Sim arrives I’ll post an update as to whether or not it worked with T-Mobile’s data network. Update:  The new sim unlocker arived and didn’t work at all.  This was the new one that they say requires no cutting to your sim card.  It didn’t fit in the iPhone first of all.  Secondly when I finally got it in, it didn’t work at all.  Anyway, I’m not waisting any more cash on this experiment for now.  If you have a better experience with and x-sim, post a comment and let me know.