Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

 

On one occasion, I purposefully left for a destination without printing directions because I figured I could just use the navigation application.  After futzing around to enter the destination while heading out to the car, I started the navigation going.  It quickly said that it didn't have a GPS signal.  No amount of moving it around in the car would fix this.  In the end, I had to pull over, open Google Maps, search for the location, and then trying to figure out the route myself.  Unfortunately, Google Maps relied on the numeric keys being active, so I couldn't do that.  Back over to Sprint Navigation and I had to try to move about the map to find the road names and figure out where I was and where I needed to go.  Very frustrating!

The second big failing experience was when leaving the Boston airport and trying to go somewhere new.  After taking the wrong turn out of the rental car place, I tried to quickly get the navigation going so I could get back on the Google route that I'd printed out.  Unfortunately, once again, I could not coerce the phone in to getting a GPS signal.  I pulled over at one point and got out, where it finally got one so I could see the route from where I was (which I didn't know), but once back in the car and moving the navigation stopped.

Even worse, though, was that the application simply exited at one point.  The phone was still on.  I tried to launch it again and it then told me that it didn't have enough battery life to run.  Well, considering that's all I wanted was to use what little battery it had to get a few more directions, I was a bit miffed that I couldn't force it to launch.

So, I was hopeful that maybe Samsung had just done something wrong with the GPS on the UpStage.  However, a couple of times now I've launched the Sprint Navigation application on the LG Muziq and it has not gotten any GPS fix.  However, the one oddity is that it always seems to launch and show the map for where I am, then it loses it's fix and never gets it back.  I'm not sure what's up with that, but in the end, I can't rely on it.

However, in comparison, the Apple iPhone doesn't have GPS at all.  As it turns out, this ends up working better anyway.  Why?  Well, the Google Maps application is really easy to use.  While it's doing turn-by-turn directions, you can page forward and backward through each turn and intersection.  Then, you can easily pan around and zoom in or out with simple finger gestures.  All of this is quite fast over EDGE. (Going to satellite view is a bit slow, but still works.)  The advantage here is that you aren't expecting it to tell you where to go, so you pay attention to the distances and know when to go to the next turn view.  However, this is better than a paper print out because it can easily be adjusted if you get off track and since it works fine with just maps, you can do your own routing if needed without having to deal with getting a GPS fix or not having enough detail on the printed maps.

I haven't had a chance to see if lack of GPS affects my Verizon LG The V VX9800 handset.  Others have said they haven't had any problems with it, though.  It is odd that I can't get a fix in cars even though I can get a fix in an indoor location -- both at my house and at my office, both places where a normal handheld GPS receiver doesn't work.

I should also point out that a few reports have shown that the LG Muziq is actually a very good navigation phone and has a very high accuracy.  This may be true, when it works.  I'm hoping that maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but whatever it might be, it's not terribly obvious to me.  Of course, I've reported all of this to Sprint as part of their ambassador program (the whole point of it, I believe).