Why Doesn’t My Treo Have GPS?
It has been a question that I’ve wondered for a long time. Why doesn’t my Treo have GPS? The answer and its solution is in the following article:
They have finally been able to explain to me why most phones don’t have a GPS feature.
“One of the reasons handsets have been slower to market is their sensitivity to applications that use a lot of power.â€
GPS chips suck power from your batteries like you wouldn’t believe. That’s not much of an issue if you are using your GPS system in a car where you can plug it into the cigarette lighter, but on a handheld phone, it’s more difficult to keep your battery charged on the run.
Here are my questions:
Why don’t they let me choose when the GPS chip is running? Then I could use the GPS when I needed it, but it wouldn’t drain my battery when I didn’t.
Why are they using GPS at all? You can get a general positioning from the readings from the cell towers around you. Based on signal strength and which cell towers your phone is accessing, you could extrapolate the approximate position of the person holding the phone. It’s not GPS perfect, but most people don’t need that. They just need to know where the closest gas station is. Would the computation of the cell tower data suck more power than a GPS chip? I don’t know, but I don’t see any companies talking about using the data they already have floating in the airwaves.
It looks like some companies are working on low power GPS chips, so it might be a moot point. Until then, we wait for the totally cool things to show up in our lives. I’m still waiting for my flying car, but the practical GPS phone might be a little closer to reality.