Notices

Do you mean A-GPS? Yes.
You can disable the GPS, I assume it then only uses network positioning, not sure though.

I can tell you from experience it does. I can also tell you from experience that A-GPS really sucks when it comes to figuring out where you are unless you're in a densely towered area (like a city). Also, the Nokia bits that update the location only do so when you change towers, so you'll go several minutes often between point updates in city areas, and 10s of minutes in rural areas, even going over 60mph (100kph).

If you're using it for a VERY long trip that you already know, and are just using it to help track about where you are, it's ok. But if you want turn-by-turn, A-GPS is not what you want.

Martin: Is there anything in the API that tells you the source of the GPS info you're getting? (A-GPS vs GPS vs wifi...) If so, is there a way to flush and re-request specifically when using A-GPS vs waiting for the tower change to trigger it in the Nokia lib? If so, adding that so it periodically updates if using A-GPS may be nice.

woody14619, you might want to read up on A-GPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-GPS)

What you are talking about is just celltower location based navigation, and while this info is used in A-GPS, it is not the same

(sorry for the nitpicking)

Sorry to break this to you, but when Nokia says A-GPS in their menus, they're really talking about cell tower location triangulation. If you look at the settings menu, Nokia allows you to turn off GPS and leave "A-GPS" enabled in the settings. Given the technical definition you linked to, that's a nonsensical setting, since you can't have A-GPS without GPS by that definition. What you're actually getting in that mode (which is what we're talking about here) IS in fact cell tower location, since it's not turning on the GPS hardware.

Nokia had the option in PR1.0 to use "A-GPS", but it didn't actually seed the GPS chipset with the start location, so accurate GPS locks still took upwards of 20 seconds for most people. As of PR1.1 (or 1.1.1) they started seeding the GPS location if this setting was on. To this day they still send the raw A-GPS hit as an authoritative location (with a huge error margin) based on tower location until the GPS actually gives back it's first "valid" location.

So while technically it may not be correct to call that "A-GPS", I'm using the term because that's how Nokia has labeled cell tower triangulation in the settings menu. To be fair, Apple and a couple other vendors also use the term A-GPS (albeit incorrectly) to mean cell tower location that may or may not be feed to an actual GPS system as a seed for it's starting location.

OK, you stick with the Nokia definition, I'll stick with the technically correct one

As Mr. Webster will happily point out, the one that gains common usage often becomes the real definition over time, even if it's technically incorrect. That's why we park in our driveways and drive on our parkways, for example.

Even in the wikipedia article there's a note that the term "aGPS" is often used for cell tower triangulation, which unfortunately is very close to (and easily confused with) A-GPS. In fact, I would be quite surprised if Nokia is actually doing A-GPS (downloading the almanac and such), vs just aGPS and using that as a rough start point for the GPS.

I just wish it wouldn't give an "authoritative" location based on a bad-data triangulation return from A-GPS (or aGPS) being on. I have multiple levels of cached blue water tiles just off the coast of Africa thanks to that.

i'm new to this apps. just installed it today and i think i like it. however there are several things i might need to point out
i've found similar posts asking the same questions on earlier pages, however i still haven't found the expected answers yet (honestly i didn't read every single post in this thread. it's 70+ pages, so i'd missed some )

overall i like this apps. it's just the gui, i don't quite comfortable using it (big buttons, non-hildonized menu ie. you have to tap the big yellow button to back to prev page or instead of combo box, you have to tap a button until it choose the desired option)
i know you did this for "big finger friendly" feature, but it would be great if you could provide a theme that more n900-like

i found a 3rd party theme called modrana-theme-ios. though i've never get any screenshot of this, i tried to install it but seems it's not working for the latest version of modrana
there are only 2 themes available (default and night) and theme-ios is installed at /opt/modrana/icons/bitmap instead of /opt/modrana/themes
could be it's built for earlier version of modrana and no longer compatible with the new one. but can anybody tell me how to use it for this new version of modrana?

and for offline map download using gmapcatcher as told at some posts at earlier pages, how do i export it to modrana since it seems that they both using different file structure?

thanks

Hi Martin,
Did you get chance to look at this issue at all; I'm eagerly awaiting to start on an alternative TTS routing plugin.
Thanks!



Have a look at AGTL (in the repos); it can download maps and works well with modRana.

thanks but doesn't it mean i still have to download the map from the phone?
i wish there's a way to download it using pc and export it to the phone
thanks anw

On your PC you can use Mobile Atlas Creator. Set atlas format to "OSMTracker tile storage". There is plenty of information on how to use this tool including video tutorials. Just google it.