... so states the honorable New York Times in reviewing a handful iPhone nav apps:

(...) most navigation apps are monsters: since most of them store maps on the phone itself, they are usually at least 1.2 gigabytes in size, which means a lot less room for your music and photos. That also means that these apps can’t be directly downloaded to the phone, but must first be transmitted to a PC. With a standard broadband connection, that can take hours, plus more hours to transfer the app to the phone. Download a new map or program update every few months, and the process starts all over again.

This is a drawback, indeed: whenever I have to update my Navigon app on the iPhone, a lot of housekeeping needs to happen first as the large install only will work if there's enough free space on the device. Naturally, there isn't, so throwing away tons of beloved music and audiobooks just to be reinstalled after Navigon is being updated isn't a pleasant sidestep.

As the NYT quotes a report from iSuppli, GPS applications for smartphones are about to explode, growing from 2.5 percent of users today to 10.5 percent in 2013. And half of those will be iPhone owners.

Of the four GPS apps I tested — from major navigation companies — each crashed several times, jolting my iPhone back to the home screen. Occasionally, the iPhone did not seem to recognize that I was even using the GPS feature, and the phone simply shut off. None of the apps could keep up with my driving. I often made a turn or reached an intersection before the map redrew to indicate that I had. At other times, the app showed me making a turn before I actually had.

So those big monsters don't keep up with the promise they were bought for: navigate you savely. Naturally, an app that needs to fetch maps online stands behind if you drive to fast and 3G signal falls back to GPRS. The alternative is to preload maps to the device and render it there - the approach Nokia took and used gate5's technology to display maps on the small screen. The single point of possible failure then remains the paid routing calculation being transferred from a remote server back to the device - a much easier task than have the device limited processing capabilites doing this on top.

With this in mind, our upcoming United Maps iPhone walk&ride app will both render and route you onboard: staying safely away from urban canyons and transmission leaks. It'll even work without GPS activated - as finding your urban position can easily be accomplished by finding the street crossing you're at.

(via Slashgeo)

Slashdot discusses a story named Chimps Have a Built-In GPS:

"European researchers have discovered that chimpanzees have a built-in mental GPS, keeping 'a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.' Using GPS, two primatologists followed 15 chimpanzees for 217 days, and determined that the apes were 'using a mental map built around geometric coordinates.' They're not just identifying landmarks in their surroundings, and in fact, even when swinging through trees, the chimps planned out their route several trees in advance. Here's the paper in the journal Animal Behavior ." (...)

Remember that cows point North?

Wired reminds that GPS is just in its adolescence - being a public service since not more than 5481 days.

Wonder what the next 5000 days will bring.

Here's the talk we presented at Telematics Munich 2008:

Comments are opened -- you're welcome to give feedback.

We had this pointer on Sept 25:

Researchers at Cornell University successfully spoofed the signal of a global positioning system (GPS) receiver, sending it a false signal that it accepted as an authentic one. The research aimed to demonstrate that a navigation device can be fooled (...).

Finally, this story made it into geek mainstream -- at Heise online and their german magazine 'Technology Review'. Headline: 'Der GPS-Hack' -- read on.

The spyglasses at Spatial Sustain got it and others followed:

Researchers at Cornell University successfully spoofed the signal of a global positioning system (GPS) receiver, sending it a false signal that it accepted as an authentic one. The research aimed to demonstrate that a navigation device can be fooled (...).

This story will make it into mainstream, I guess.

David Pogue, the famous Tech critter at NYT isn't really positive about the iPhone's GPS-capabilities:

According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

Huups - Steve Lombardi who is with the Virtual Earth team at Microsoft completes this statement and pushes into the opposite direction:

(...) still a 2 minute perusal of the wikipedia article on GPS by Apple could help to avoid further clouding of this already very misunderstood technology. If you can get 2 successive fixes, you can calculate direction and speed. assuming you have access to the underlying street network, you can then calculate turn guidance. software and data!

... with a little help by DHL, to be seen at YouTube:

Best application in section Infotainment:

Earthcomber. These guys are working on ways to exploit GPS technology in mobile phones. Their winning entry involved a partnership with the Travel Channel where a visitor to Chicago could choose to be informed of attractions and sites around his or her current location.

Wonder why they put them into "Infotainment" ... and gosh: they've taken my favorite claim "your personal radar" ... nevertheless: all the best, folks!

CloudMade is an ambitious "mapping company created to professionalise and package geo data from OpenStreetMap, a global initiative to create a free, editable map of the world from user-generated input."

A great idea worth funding!

As United Maps starts to provide datasets for near-field pedestrian navigation, this is fascinating. Interesting to see how UGMC (user generated mapping contents - did we have this acronym already?) will cover areas beyond larger cities with an active crowd of GPS enthusiasts.