It has all come to fruition. My wife has an app from Michael’s and from K-mart that texts her an ad whenever we drive past the store, wherever we are in the country. Quite an effective marketing technique, when my wife yells “Turn Here!” and grabs my arm so that we can pull into Michael’s. But we couldn’t see all of the benefits to having big brother watching us: Google Maps traffic feature can tell that there is traffic because of all of the slow moving phones in all of the cars, and don’t forget Foursquare, and all of the other “Here I am!!!” apps. Big brother knows where we are, and what we are doing, 24/7.
So, query: do all cell phones in the USA now have gps? Is there such a thing as a cheap dumb phone that just makes calls?
( I’m using a gsm phone bought in France that doesn’t have any such feature. My provider is going to disconnect me at the end of the year because of the technology, but that’s alright because I was going to move to a different provider anyway. )
I live in Fort Worth, and work in a town called Haslet. Normally I work Monday night, but I had this past Monday off. I accidentally swiped down on my iPhone, bringing up Calendar/Notifications screen. After telling me the weather, it told me that at this time it would take me 23 minutes to get to Haslet.
Apparently my phone knows not only where I go, but when I can be expected to go there. That notification hasn’t appeared the past three nights, which I normally have off. My next scheduled shift is tomorrow night. I’ll see if it pops up again.
It looks like they can use a triangulation method, as long as it is accurate within 100 meters 67% of the time, and within 300 meters 95% of the time. It seems to me that it would just be easier to buy back all of the old handsets, and not sell any more, so that they only have to meet the GPS standard (50 meters 67%, 150 meter 95%).
I knew a woman circa 1998 who would turn off her cellphone and remove the battery at times. I thought she was touched by madness. She owned and ran a communications store that began with pagers in the 80s then added cellular communications.
It’s a shame this column perpetuates the myth that the cell phone network is “a hexagonal array of cells, each of which has an antenna at the center”. Look at a cell tower sometime. They are triangular. Hexagonal cells have 5 sides, not 3. It is the vertices that have 3 sides. The antennas are located at the vertices, not the center, of the cells. http://www.privateline.com/Cellbasics/cellsitehex.gif
I thought he was talking about the network, which can be visualized as a hexagonal array of cells (each covering some pretty large area) with the cell tower in the middle of the area.
I should have clicked on your link before commenting. I thought you meant that the antenna tower itself was a hexagon with some kind of antenna in the middle. I thought you had misinterpreted his comment to be about the antenna itself, not the network. Sorry about that.
The old standard flip phone is getting harder and harder to procure. In the U.S., most of the phone companies have gone with an all you can eat platter for phone calls and SMS and then humungous blocks of data. For example, 2Gb per month is a tiny allotment. Even there, the pressure is on providing unlimited data plans.
So, if you’re going to pay $50 per month whether you have an old flip phone, or the latest Android or iPhone, why bother with the old flip phone? The last thing Americans do with their phones is make phone calls.
I have an AT&T cell phone, that I got about 5 years ago, with an inexpensive pre-paid plan that I have to re-up at $25 once every three months. It gets me 90 minutes of time for each re-up. The phone itself appears to be minimal. It doesn’t have a camera, and if it has any GPS I sure don’t know about it. It has a small screen about 1" wide and 1½" high, and can do Internet, if doing Internet on a 1"x1½" screen counts as doing Internet. I have no idea if it has any memory for downloading apps, but I’d be very surprised if it does. It can do texting. It came with a very sketchy instruction book, hardly more than a perfunctory outline, and I didn’t even read most of that. Maybe I would if I can find it now. (ETA: My sole intended use is to carry with me when I go anywhere, to use in emergencies like if my car breaks down, or to keep in touch with people while I am on the road. I’ve probably made and received less than 10 calls on it in the 5 years that I’ve owned it.)
Does that sound like a state-of-the-art cell phone as they were about 5 years ago? If I got a brand new cheap pre-paid plan today, what kind of phone would come with it, and with what modern features?
More like about ten years ago. Something like a Palm Treo 650. The original iPhone came out in 2007, and it had triangulation-based fake GPS. The iPhone 3G (the second generation) in 2008 added real GPS, while keeping triangulation because it’s instant-on, and GPS isn’t.
In a way, I admire that, (because at one time I thought of doing the same thing).
But in another way, I can’t help but wonder. I’m sure she’s been doing that ever since then, because the collection of data has only increased. So now I ask: “By going to all that trouble for getting close to two decades–by removing the batteries every time she has not been using her phone(s), over and over again, for so many years–what exactly has she prevented?”
If we’re talking AT&T, if you have any sense you buy the phone you like and put an AT&T SIM in it. You’re not required to use a carrier-provided phone and GoPhone activation is free.
In fact, even if you do purchase a GoPhone package, it’s a good idea to toss the included SIM and use your own. They’ve a history of providing phones with locked SIMs.
The current top-of-the-line AT&T prepaid plan for smartphones is $60/month for unlimited calling and text, 4GB of (30-day) rollover data, and tethering. In fact, I’m using a tethered Samsung with GoPhone service and a standard AT&T SIM (hand-crafted from a larger SIM) right now. I don’t have details for the other plans at hand, but I know they go right back to the old 10-cent-a-minute deal.
The (sad?) thing about this post is that it really doesn’t have anything to do with GPS. The cell carriers can tell where you are on any phone- in most cases, you’re within range of several cell towers, and the providers can tell which one you’re closest to, by which one you’re connected to- ISTR that phones always try to connect to the highest signal strength one.
Beyond that, most smartphones can actually triangulate your position based on the signal strengths to whatever cell towers AND known wi-fi networks are in range. This is surprisingly accurate- at work, the building attenuates the GPS signals such that I can’t get a fix, but the cell-tower/wi-fi method will usually fix me within about 200 meters of where I’m actually at, which for most purposes like telling if you’re at work or at home, is more than good enough.
Tethering is used when your cell phone has an internet connection (using the cellular network) and your laptop doesn’t have an internet connection (because there’s no free WiFi available) so you put the two devices together and let your laptop share the phone’s internet connection. A common way of doing this is for your smart phone to temporarily become a WiFi hotspot. From the computer’s point of view, you connect to it just as if it were a router/modem.
A few years ago, some carriers forbade tethering and the only way to make it happen was to “unlock” or “jailbreak” the phone and install a rogue operating system. But now most carriers are fine with it and your cell phone probably has an app built right in for it. The thing to watch out for is that your monthly plan probably only allows a few GB of cellular data and if you exceed that limit then they hit you with overage charges. It’s easy to use up a whole month’s worth of cellular data in just one afternoon of tethering with streaming video.
