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Samsung Nexus

 

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GPS - Samsung GT i9000 Galaxy S?

I am planning on purchasing an international Samsung GT i9000 Galaxy S and am aware that people are experiencing GPS and magnetometer (compass) problems. I was just wondering how far off the GPS tracking is on the phone. How well does it handle tracking when on foot or in a car? Are these problems also prevalent on the international version or just the Vibrant and Captivate?

It would really be helpful if you could share your experiences with the phone. Do you think this is a hardware or software problem? It would be great if you could provide comparisons with other phones such as the Nexus One.
My question specifically refers to Standalone GPS Performance without wireless network assistance.

The bulk of the complaints are that it has poor reception in comparison to other phones. However I think this is mainly an incorrect diagnosis by the people reporting the problem.

When I test the GPS on my GalaxyS the signal strengths are fine. It does however take a long time to give an initial position fix and even longer before it's tracking a reasonable number of satellites. This could easily be taken as being a sign of poor reception by someone unfamiliar with how GPS works.

What is actually going on is that it looks like the phone isn't storing the almanac, that's a database that gives a GPS receiver the orbital information about the satellites. With an almanac, a rough location (within say a hundred miles) and the time to within an hour or so a GPS receiver knows which satellites are overhead and so can lock onto the 4 needed for a position fairly quickly. Without an almanac it has to search through all of the possible satellite IDs until it happens to hit 4 or more that are in view.
This is the difference between taking 10-15 seconds to give a position and taking over a minute.

Most cell phones use the cell network data connection to download an almanac from the internet when you switch the GPS on, for some reason the GalaxyS doesn't default to doing this. Alternatively the GPS satellites transmit the almanac but it takes about 20 minutes of running GPS for the whole thing and even if you wait this long the phone doesn't seem to store it and then use it the next time you use GPS.

If you have an unlimited data connection there is a trivial fix, you can go into the android GPS settings and tell it to download the almanac from google. Instructions on doing that are in the link at the end. Even if you have a metered data plan this is probably worth it, the amount of data involved is tiny.

Getting the phone to correctly store and then use the almanac the next time will need a software update from samsung.

Once it's got an almanac GPS performance is exactly as you would expect from an cell phone GPS, ~5 meters outside, more like 50-100 meters indoors.

Instructions in setting the phone to download an almanac:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=728611

Nexus 2 Google Phone (by Samsung) Rumor Roundup


 

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Samsung Continuum phone features secondary ticker display
As expected, Verizon Wireless and Samsung Mobile announced a new Galaxy S smartphone called the Samsung Continuum, offering Android 2.1 and a secondary 1.8-inch "Ticker Display" in addition to the main 3.4-inch screen.