GPS – Samsung GT i9000 Galaxy S?
Query by Adrian U:
GPS – Samsung GT i9000 Galaxy S?
I am arranging on purchasing an international Samsung GT i9000 Galaxy S and am conscious that folks are experiencing GPS and magnetometer (compass) problems. I was just asking yourself how far off the GPS tracking is on the mobile phone. How properly does it take care of tracking when on foot or in a car? Are these issues also prevalent on the international version or just the Vibrant and Captivate?
It would really be beneficial if you could share your experiences with the mobile phone. Do you believe this is a hardware or software program difficulty? It would be excellent if you could supply comparisons with other phones this kind of as the Nexus One.
My query especially refers to Standalone GPS Performance without wireless network help.
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Answer by rafaelous
It finds it tough to get a GPS repair on all Galaxy S phones. A software package fix will be with us by the end of the month according to Samsung UK even though as well as Froyo.
Answer by A
The bulk of the complaints are that it has poor reception in comparison to other phones. However I consider this is primarily an incorrect diagnosis by the people reporting the problem.
When I check the GPS on my GalaxyS the signal strengths are fine. It does nonetheless take a prolonged time to give an initial position repair and even longer prior to it is tracking a fair number of satellites. This could effortlessly be taken as being a sign of poor reception by an individual unfamiliar with how GPS functions.
What is actually going on is that it looks like the phone is not storing the almanac, that is a database that gives a GPS receiver the orbital information about the satellites. With an almanac, a rough location (inside of say a hundred miles) and the time to inside of an hour or so a GPS receiver knows which satellites are overhead and so can lock onto the 4 necessary for a position fairly speedily. Without having an almanac it has to search by way of all of the achievable satellite IDs right up until it takes place to hit 4 or a lot more that are in view.
This is the distinction among taking 10-15 seconds to give a position and taking over a minute.
Most cell phones use the cell network information connection to download an almanac from the net when you switch the GPS on, for some cause the GalaxyS doesn’t default to doing this. Alternatively the GPS satellites transmit the almanac but it will take about 20 minutes of running GPS for the whole point and even if you wait this prolonged the cellphone does not seem to store it and then use it the next time you use GPS.
If you have an unlimited information connection there is a trivial repair, you can go into the android GPS settings and tell it to download the almanac from google. Guidelines on performing that are in the hyperlink at the end. Even if you have a metered data plan this is most likely worth it, the amount of data involved is tiny.
Acquiring the cellphone to appropriately retailer and then use the almanac the up coming time will need to have a computer software update from samsung.
As soon as it’s got an almanac GPS overall performance is precisely as you would expect from an cell telephone GPS, ~5 meters outdoors, a lot more like 50-100 meters indoors.
Guidelines in setting the cellphone to download an almanac:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=728611
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