Symbian Guru Ricky got his hands on the latest internal Nokia N95 firmware, biggest feature upgrade: assisted global positioning. What makes AGPS different from standard GPS?
Standard GPS works without the need to be connected to a network of any kind. The stuff you see in cars, boats, the Nokia N95 before today’s firmware, they all had to sync with at least 3 satellites in line of sight to get a fix and then process data. This takes time, a lot of time. When I was trialing the N95 a couple of months ago I got the GPS to get a fix only once. Sure GPS chips are getting better and faster, but how else can this lock on speed be enhanced? This is where AGPS comes in.
The A in AGPS stands for assisted. Your mobile takes a snapshot of what current satellites are visible and talks to a server that knows where the closest cell phone towers are. The server calculates your exact location and spits it back out to your device. Wicked wicked fast. I had the pleasure of working at Helio, all of their devices have AGPS. Lock on time was less than 5 seconds and I hope Nokia can get there one of these days.
How can Helio do it so quickly, yet Nokia can’t? Helio knows the exact coordinates of all their (Sprint’s) cellphone towers. Nokia doesn’t have that luxury, but this is where users like Ricky and other N95 owners come in. Now this is just a theory, but I think that once the GPS finds your location it scans for nearby cellphone towers. This information is then sent to Nokia’s central database where they are slowly, but surely, creating a map of cell towers all around the world.
AGPS used to be something that was operator dependent, now Nokia might be turning the tables and making it hardware vendor dependent as well. What can Nokia do with this database? Lisence it and make money.