Location Services on the iPod Touch

pejacoby — Thu, 02/18/2010 - 16:34

Running on my iPod Touch 3G (32gb) with 3.1.3, I'm finding Location Services to be a bit flakey. A few days ago aboard a school bus I picked up 700+ APs. Looking at the KML file, about 300 of them were at the SAME location. We were in a pretty populated area, and not that many of the APs were new to WiGLE, so it seems odd to have a bunch pile up.

How often WiFiWhere gets the location from Location Services? Was this most likely a glitch with Location Services updating, perhaps due to the Faraday-cage surroundings of the bus?

Looks like I'll have to jailbreak my Touch to have any chance of adding a real GPS...

WiFi-Where

Location Data on iPod Touch

codemonkey57 — Mon, 02/22/2010 - 03:33

Yes, the iPod Touch doesn't have real GPS hardware, so the location information available is only through WiFi-location. The same goes for the original iPhone - it relies on WiFi and cellular location.

WiFi-Where is configured to try and get the best accuracy possible from Location Services. Our application gets notified by the OS when the location or accuracy change.

One thing you'll notice when using an iPod Touch or iPhone 2G is that the location accuracy is much worse. I'm indoors, and my iPod Touch and iPhone 2G are showing an accuracy of around 146 meters, whereas my iPhone 3G shows an accuracy of 47 meters. If I step outside my iPhone 3G will get down to 17m or so.

In Settings there is the "Location Accuracy Filter" which was meant to allow you to ignore hotspots when the location is not good enough. Although admittedly this feature is more useful for the iPhone 3G.

I'm guessing that what occurred in your case above is that your iPod grabbed a good location while you were connected to a hotspot, and then as you left that place, it would then use the 'last location' for each new hotspot. I think there is room for some improvement here in the software. If the location does not have the desired accuracy we shouldn't save the location info.

I'm not too familiar with jailbroken GPS solutions. I think we could only take advantage of them if they somehow hooked into Core Location.

It looks like there are a

pejacoby — Tue, 02/23/2010 - 20:03

It looks like there are a couple of approaches to GPS on jailbroken iPods:

http://www.roqy-bluetooth.net/wp/ -- requires jailbreak, works with external devices, they claim compatibility with ALL applications

http://www.orangegadgets.com/products.html -- requires jailbreak, supply their own device

I upgraded my iTouch to 3.1.3 so I'm trying to decide if I should wait for the .3 jailbreak or fall back to .2 and try out roqy with my Holux GPSlim 236.

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