Dear Nokia: Check out this GPS chip that works indoors
By Stefan Constantinescu on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 1:38 PM PST In Ideas and rants
u-blox AG, the leading Swiss provider of GPS receiver technology, will unveil u-blox 5, a GPS and Galileo-ready chip featuring an acquisition performance of less than one second, at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona.
3GSM, which runs from 12-15 February, is one of the world’s largest telecommunications trade fairs and is expected to attract more than 60,000 visitors this year, providing a unique opportunity for mobile network providers, product manufacturers and distributors to meet and exchange views.
u-blox will be promoting its u-blox 5 chip at the event in Hall 2, Booth C116. The new technology boasts an acquisition and tracking sensitivity of -160 dBm that enables indoor coverage, a 50-channel engine and a power consumption of less than 50 mW. Its energy efficiency and tracking sensitivity make it ideal for GPS-enabled mobile phones and other battery-operated portable devices that operate in difficult indoor environments like shopping malls, train stations and urban canyons.
Source: ublox
Via: Phone Scoop
When Rafe said this about the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 GPS ability, I was a bit let down:
In use, I found the GPS took a few minutes to ‘lock on’ when inside (next to a window) from a cold start; outside it was much quicker, as expected, and soft starts were faster still (a matter of a few seconds). A subjective first impression suggests the N95 has similar capabilities to SIRF II GPS chipsets.
Source: All About Symbian
The GPS is less powerful than the best external Bluetooth GPS on the market (those which use the SIRF III chipsets). I would say it is similar to SIRF II chipsets though may have slightly poorer accuracy. One of the problems here is that when positioning the N95 you generally have to do so for viewing, whereas Bluetooth GPS can be placed on a shelf or window ledge for better reception. A good example of this is for use in a car. I find I have to push a Bluetooth GPS as far back as possible on the dash board to get a good signal. This is going to be harder to do with an N95. In my initial tests I had trouble getting a reliable signal with the N95 tucked down in the car.
GPS should be something I shouldn’t have to worry about. It should just work. Now price and power consumption has a lot to do with the chip selection process at Nokia … but all I’m asking is that Nokia get an engineering sample of some sort. After all both you and ublox are going to be at 3GSM!
Typically G-Mouse or Bluetooth type of GPS receiver has better performance than Smart-Phone embedded GPS and Personal Navigator Devices. This is due to much higher interference within those devices.
Although ublox5 is touting 50 channel 1 million correlator -160dBm sensitivity design, it might not perform significantly better than the SiRFstarIII. There are many unstated conditions for the “1M correlator”, “-160dBm sensitivity” to be valid; wich is normally not clearly stated in their marketing announcements.
With no common test standards, the GPS specification listed by chipset manufacturers is becoming quite useless. Ones needs to actually test GPS receivers using a particular chipset in order to fully understand its performance.