Is there a website anywhere which sorts the various smartphones out there by the quality of their GPS units?
A bit of background: I’m a golfer. I am addicted to using a Golf GPS app on my smartphone (in my case a Motorola Droid X) while on the golf course to give me the distance to my target. Is it 175 yards to that dogleg or 181? Sevenwood needs to know!!!
Today was a heavily overcast day on the course and my trusty Motorola Droid X simply could not get its GPS unit to synch up, using either my favorite Golf GPS app (SkyDroid) or a more basic GPS tool (“GPS Status and Toolbox” by EclipSim) at all during the entire round. I tried everything, including rebooting my phone, clearing my cached GPS data and redownloading assistance data from the Internet. Nothing worked. Fortunately for me, my golf partner had no problems at all using the very same apps and his HTC Droid Incredible.
So now I’m wondering: Is there a difference between the internal GPS units of different smartphones? Is there a website anywhere that breaks out these differences? Help!
An aside: After the round was over and the skies cleared up, the GPS unit on my Motorola Droid X started working just fine, so this was not a permanent hardware failure at least.
The only part of that I can help with is the “is there a difference” question.
Yes. Different phones have different sensitivities. I remember one product at my last company where we had a…questionable…gounding scheme on the GPS board. The result was some phones of the same model noticeably better than others. We fixed it before we shipped, but it shows how sensitive it can be.
So yeah…I can easily believe someone else’s phone worked better in bad conditions.
I question the usefulness of this app. With my handheld gps, the best accuracy I get is about 6m, and typically it is more like 10m. That’s not really accurate enough for golf.
Not for the pros maybe, but it’s good enough when you’re a 20+ handicapper like me. The big variable here is my accuracy, not the GPS unit’s.
Seriously, when I’ve yanked a drive 20+ yards left of the fairway and there’s absolutely nothing nearby that looks anything like a yardage marker it’s really helpful to know within ten yards how far away that accessible spot ahead in the middle of the fairway is.
(Also, I have to point out that all of those other times when the GPS on my cellphone is working I’ve found that if I use it while standing on a yardage-marked sprinkler head my cellphone reads within 3-5 yards of the yardage marked on that sprinkler head.)
