Measures



  • I got a 3G plan a few days ago. I was walking around with my tablet in some closed space so it wasn't getting any GPS signal. So I wondered if it could find itself through the carrier's antennas. Resulting in this:

    "Precisão de 60m" translates roughly to "precision of ~190 ft".

    TRWTF isn't the accuracy of the tablet in finding itself - I know you can do better with a mobile line but that level of precision unusual. TRWTF is the scale in the lower left corner showing how long 2,000 feet / 500 meters lines would be, and yet Google Maps thinks the blue circle has a 60m diameter (that's about 196 feet).

    I'm glad I don't use it for driving assistance. I'd hate to be told to "turn left on the corner 200 feet ahead" just to miss the point by 14 blocks.



  • I don't think the 60m refers to the diameter of the large blue circle - it's the precision of locating the small blue dot. The large circle is there to help you see the dot.



  • @Fjp said:

    I don't think the 60m refers to the diameter of the large blue circle - it's the precision of locating the small blue dot. The large circle is there to help you see the dot.

    What you can't see is that that the blue circle changes size depending on the precision.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    @Fjp said:
    I don't think the 60m refers to the diameter of the large blue circle - it's the precision of locating the small blue dot. The large circle is there to help you see the dot.

    What you can't see is that that the blue circle changes size depending on the precision.

    This is true.  I wonder if the size of the blue circle is SUPPOSED to be exactly the precision, or if it's supposed to just give you an idea on how precise it is.  (Very precise, somewhat precise, not precise)



  • @Renan said:

    I'm glad I don't use it for driving assistance. I'd hate to be told to "turn left on the corner 200 feet ahead" just to miss the point by 14 blocks.

    That part actually works okay. The bigger problem of Google Maps turn-by-turn navigation:

    No offline support. Yes, you can cache a part of the map in advance (no, not a whole country. just a square of 80 km x 80 km). However, if you don't have an active data connection, you can forget about navigation.

    That's the part which makes me look very seriously at a Lumia 920 currently.



  • @Renan said:

    I'm glad I don't use it for driving assistance. I'd hate to be told to "turn left on the corner 200 feet ahead" just to miss the point by 14 blocks.
    You could always use iOS 6's maps... [ducks]

     



  • @Rhywden said:

    That's the part which makes me look very seriously at a Lumia 920 currently.

    Nokia recently published their "Nokia Here" maps for Android (and iPhone) as well. They are free too (except you have to register to Amazon app store, because they didn't publish them on the default one). It's not clear whether the version they put in their Win8 phones are any better, but I would suspect it isn't. Also there are many other fully offline navigations that are still cheaper than a new phone (there are also many free ones using Open Street Map data, but that is of wildly varying quality; in some areas it's best maps available, in some areas it's totally unusable and in some it's both).



  • @Fjp said:

    I don't think the 60m refers to the diameter of the large blue circle - it's the precision of locating the small blue dot. The large circle is there to help you see the dot.

    When GPS is on, the circle is just a couple pixels larger than the dot on that zoom level. When the precision is about 15 feet, which is about as much as you get with most GPS devices, the circle size is accurate.



  • @Bulb said:

    @Rhywden said:
    That's the part which makes me look very seriously at a Lumia 920 currently.

    Nokia recently published their "Nokia Here" maps for Android (and iPhone) as well. They are free too (except you have to register to Amazon app store, because they didn't publish them on the default one). It's not clear whether the version they put in their Win8 phones are any better, but I would suspect it isn't. Also there are many other fully offline navigations that are still cheaper than a new phone (there are also many free ones using Open Street Map data, but that is of wildly varying quality; in some areas it's best maps available, in some areas it's totally unusable and in some it's both).

    While Nokia does offer navigation with Nokia Here on Android, it's not turn-by-turn yet.



  • Nokia... heh... They have BIG nothing for my entire country.



  • @Rhywden said:

    While Nokia does offer navigation with Nokia Here on Android, it's not turn-by-turn yet.
    And not available in the country where I live. This is getting tiring, these per-country restrictions on apps for no good reason.

     



  • That was never a problem for me, until I moved to DC and had to go through tunnels more often. I had assumed that if I'm interstate 66, heading East, and I enter a tunnel that the google maps would just use my current speed and such to keep the map updated until I got out of the tunnel. But it doesn't, it just stops wherever I happen to have lost signal. Then when I regain it on the other side, I jump a half mile ahead to where I'm currently at.



  • @Jeremy D. Pavleck said:

    That was never a problem for me, until I moved to DC and had to go through tunnels more often. I had assumed that if I'm interstate 66, heading East, and I enter a tunnel that the google maps would just use my current speed and such to keep the map updated until I got out of the tunnel. But it doesn't, it just stops wherever I happen to have lost signal. Then when I regain it on the other side, I jump a half mile ahead to where I'm currently at.

    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation. Last I saw DARPA was backing some project on that, though.



  • @Renan said:

    @Jeremy D. Pavleck said:
    That was never a problem for me, until I moved to DC and had to go through tunnels more often. I had assumed that if I'm interstate 66, heading East, and I enter a tunnel that the google maps would just use my current speed and such to keep the map updated until I got out of the tunnel. But it doesn't, it just stops wherever I happen to have lost signal. Then when I regain it on the other side, I jump a half mile ahead to where I'm currently at.

    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation. Last I saw DARPA was backing some project on that, though.

     

    It's not true inertial nagivation, but my Garmin extrapolates position when it temporarily loses GPS signal. It's most noticable when going under bridges in slow traffic. Usually that works nice, but it's annoying if you're on something like LaSalle in Chicago and you happen to hit a red light when the El blocks GPS signals. Miss Garman assumes you're still moving, and calls out directions for the next turn, then starts recalcuating.



  • @Renan said:

    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation.

    ICBM

  • ♿ (Parody)

    @alegr said:

    @Renan said:
    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation.

    ICBM

    Yikes! Which market do you use?


  • Considered Harmful

    @boomzilla said:

    @alegr said:
    @Renan said:
    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation.

    ICBM

    Yikes! Which market do you use?

    Stark Industries is really the only brand of ICBM I trust.



  • @Renan said:

    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation. Last I saw DARPA was backing some project on that, though.
    The now-unsupported Motorola Devour supported inertial navigation using its gyroscopes and accelerometers, and now that those are standard equipment on phones the only reason not to support it is sheer laziness on the baseband developers' part.



  • @TwelveBaud said:

    The now-unsupported Motorola Devour supported inertial navigation using its gyroscopes and accelerometers, and now that those are standard equipment on phones the only reason not to support it is sheer laziness on the baseband developers' part.

    Or, gee, maybe because the accelerometers in cell phones are entirely inadequate for performing inertial navigation.

     



  • Gee!



  • @alegr said:

    @Renan said:
    AFAIK there's no device in the market that can do inertial navigation.
    ICBM
    Not particularly practical when it comes to commuting, though.

     



  • @Zylon said:

    @TwelveBaud said:

    The now-unsupported Motorola Devour supported inertial navigation using its gyroscopes and accelerometers, and now that those are standard equipment on phones the only reason not to support it is sheer laziness on the baseband developers' part.

    Or, gee, maybe because the accelerometers in cell phones are entirely inadequate for performing inertial navigation.

     

    The best gps are those built into a car, that can read the steering wheel angle and speed direct from the speedo. Those things will plot your course around a multi-level underground carpark quite accurately!



  • @Zylon said:

    @TwelveBaud said:

    The now-unsupported Motorola Devour supported inertial navigation using its gyroscopes and accelerometers, and now that those are standard equipment on phones the only reason not to support it is sheer laziness on the baseband developers' part.

    Or, gee, maybe because the accelerometers in cell phones are entirely inadequate for performing inertial navigation.

     

    I hear they got around that by mashing up Google Sky Map with the original astral navigation software from the SR-71.



  • @Zemm said:

    @Zylon said:

    @TwelveBaud said:

    The now-unsupported Motorola Devour supported inertial navigation using its gyroscopes and accelerometers, and now that those are standard equipment on phones the only reason not to support it is sheer laziness on the baseband developers' part.

    Or, gee, maybe because the accelerometers in cell phones are entirely inadequate for performing inertial navigation.

     

    The best gps are those built into a car, that can read the steering wheel angle and speed direct from the speedo. Those things will plot your course around a multi-level underground carpark quite accurately!

    Until you start drifting around corners. Probably give the poor thing an aneurysm.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Someone You Know said:

    @Zemm said:
    The best gps are those built into a car, that can read the steering wheel angle and speed direct from the speedo. Those things will plot your course around a multi-level underground carpark quite accurately!

    Until you start drifting around corners. Probably give the poor thing an aneurysm.

    Parking garages sound like they're...exciting...where you live.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Someone You Know said:
    @Zemm said:
    The best gps are those built into a car, that can read the steering wheel angle and speed direct from the speedo. Those things will plot your course around a multi-level underground carpark quite accurately!

    Until you start drifting around corners. Probably give the poor thing an aneurysm.

    Parking garages sound like they're...exciting...where you live.

    Parking garages are always exciting! Haven't you seen "All The President's Men"?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Gee!
    Yes, Mister Vermin, did you have something to contribute to the conversation?



  • @Renan said:

    TRWTF is the OP lives/works/tests his tablet near a river called Poop.


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