The device could also be giving your location based on GSM triangulation....

And not on GPS


Bye

As long you get it locked once with the Network data connection guide. Then close it down, next time it will be faster to get a lock without Internet connection. But if you restart your device, it will take somewhere between 20 to 40mins to get a lock without the guide of data connection. Mine works but i warmed up the GPS first with data connection before I leave the house. Then when I leave the house I just reopen the app again and let it search for satellites using Location app.

Ovi Maps on Maemo needs love.

I wasn't impressed when one time Ovi Maps jumped repeatedly between the start of the route and my current location, jumping about once per second, making it completely unusable with tracking on. Rebooting fixed this.

I wasn't impressed when it tracked my location and scrolled but the red circle didn't show.

I wasn't impressed when it was loading and I couldn't see a way to minimise it to get on with something else while waiting - it's quite slow to load.

I wasn't impressed when it become unresponsive, twice, locking up the GUI so that I needed to power off the N900 to recover.

I wasn't impressed when I couldn't read the map while stationary because it rotated by a random angle every few seconds. At least I could stop that by turning tracking off.

I wasn't impressed when I couldn't read the map while tracking me walking, for the same reason.

Being able to turn off rotation and just show my orientation with a small arrow would have fixed both the above.

I wasn't impressed when I could see a major road covering half the screen, but not the road's name ("A5") because the name was placed off screen instead of being dynamically placed on screen where there was plenty of room.

I wasn't impressed that despite the excellent high-res screen, it didn't show street names without zooming in quite a lot, at which point it was hard to see surrounding context for navigation.

Particularly a problem when GPS wasn't working and I needed to scroll around looking for a street - because searching for the street didn't find it.

I wasn't impressed at the slow scrolling sometimes, given how smoothly the N900 can be made to draw in things like Bounce Evolution. But scrolling was sometimes fast. Strange.

I wasn't impressed when it did not recalculate the route after I had to deviate from its calculated one. So for about 20 minutes in my journey, away from the calculated route, there was no clue about directions to take, as the calculated route wasn't even on screen at a zoom where you could see street level turnings.

It would have been nice if the journey time estimate showed estimated time to arrival from tracking current position, instead of just journey time.

I would have been nice if an Address in the contacts list could be clicked on to show that position in the map, and it would have been nice to do that when selecting a route endpoint, instead of having to search for a street name.

And of course, I wasn't impressed when I wanted to know my position in an unfamiliar town to route a journey, mobile data wasn't available because (my pre-pay had run out / 3G signal wasn't available (choose occasion)), and GPS didn't lock.

The GPS needs a bit of work with its locking problems, but even if/when GPS is made perfect and lovely, Maemo's Ovi Maps application needs quite a bit of work in the UI and reliability department, imho.

At the moment, the N900 GPS is useless for me. This is why I keep my N95 on me wherever I go... talk about multitasking.

Maybe tomtom compiles their software on the N900 as they have done on everythimg else. Or maybe not.

Either way, as far as gps go, there simply is no alternative to purposly made HW.

In addition to this, I am hugely unimpressed with the latest Points of Interest provided by Ovi Maps. I was with my friends and they wanted Domino's Pizza (pretty nasty, but that's a different argument) so I search "Domino's Pizza" in Ovi maps and I got results for locations 50+ miles from where I was at. What the heck? There are at least 2 Domino's Pizza locations here locally so this was inexcusable. Of course I whipped out my N95 and used Google Maps and within a few seconds (Ovi Maps took me a few minutes with its sluggish loading, clunky interface and slow search results) I found several local Pizza joints including Domino's and all was well, no thanks to Ovi Maps on the N900.

Another thing is that if you just try to use Search to find an address, for some reason Ovi Maps does NOT find anything and does not like it. You have to go to Route then Add Route, THEN it will find whatever forsaken address you want. Pretty unintuitive if you ask me.

Of course the N900's GPS can be useful but due to the crappy GPS software it has available it is completely rubbish.

Instead of grabbing your N95, you could have used maeMaps :-)

For me GPS is not the ovi maps application... and with this in mind the GPS is quite good. I used it several times with the app GPXView for geocaching and it turned out that the GPS is quite accurate. At least as accurate as my Garmin Forerunner 405. 405 is a small GPS but also a good one in my opinion.

My 2 pence.

I was shocked that there was no voice. I did find it handy when going to a specific place to copy the map of my destination then load it into Liqmap for browsing when I got close.

I used to use my N810 GPS on the road all the time with Wayfinder software. I sold 810 months ago.

Now I am looking at N900, but after reading this thread regarding GPS it sounds a little discouraging. Basically the N900 can't even be used as GPS like previous device 810, but it comes with GPS chip anyway. Hmmm.

So what is the main issue here... is it that Wayfinder or some other companies like Tom Tom or Garmin have not released their "app" for the N900/maemo platform? Or is the screen size of the N900 such that it's not a good device for GPS? I don't get it.