Just bought a Holux M1000 for $40, and man, there is absolutely no comparison to the built-in crap in N810 that Nokia calls GPS.

The Holux ALWAYS gets a fix within 30-35 seconds (even in the basement of my two story house). The 30 second figure is for a cold fix. If the unit has been off for a only a few minutes, it gets a fix in 3-10 seconds.

My N810 just took 3 minutes and 10 seconds to obtain a fix in my living room close to a large window. Then I shut N810 off for 10 minutes and tried to obtain a fix again. It took over 3 minutes. It appears that N810 tries to do a cold fix most of the time. Why Nokia, why?

In addition, the Holux typically sees twice as many satellites, and the signal strength is significantly better.

The Holux cost $40. After subtracting the cost of the battery, marketing costs, distribution, etc, the cost of the MTK GPS chip cannot be more than $10. The Holux is also very power efficient as it lasts over 20 hours on a relatively small battery.

Why Nokia did not use this chip in N810 is beyond me. Instead they went for the crappy TI GPS 5300 chip, which is also in their N95 and E90 phones.

Regardless of the chip, it appears that there is a problem with the GPS software. There is really no reason not to do a warm fix after only 10 minutes. I will open a bug.