Categories
GPS

Suffering from a slow N95 GPS ?

Having taken delivery of my new Nokia N95 this week, as much as I love all of the rest of the phone the performance of the GPS and in particular it’s speed to obtain it’s first fix was driving me mad – to the extent I went back to the vodafone store to talk to their experts – you can tell I was desperate.

n95 gpsThe store guy looked at the sky, no doubt hoping to blame some clouds, but disappointingly for him there were none, talk to Nokia he suggested we don’t deal with the satellite stuff.

Now I got thinking, the maps application has a network settings option to specify a network connection, I assumed this was for just downloading maps. Now the phone would sit for up to 30mins trying to obtain a signal from a collection of satellites that did not appear to be there, what if the phone was actually trying to use the network to update ephemeris data? some form of assisted GPS provided by Nokia ?

My default network setting was set to use the standard contract settings, in the past I have had problems with these with other applications, so I updated them using the neat Nokia Settings tool – and all of a sudden I started to get a fix in less than a minute.

So the moral of my story at least is.. if your shinny new N95 GPS seems slow – change the default network settings – obvious !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

22 replies on “Suffering from a slow N95 GPS ?”

Dave/steve

The page Ed’s mentioned that you would need to go to is:
http://www.nokia.com/A4144889
This is the ‘wizard’ for getting settings sent to you. There is also a ‘Settings Wizard’ in ‘Tools’ on most phones which is supposed to do the same thing, but the website method is probably better.

I would also suggest going into ‘Tools|Position’ and disabling ‘Network based’. This might have some influence on the speed too, it did on my E70.

Gents, Am I to understand that the N95 will work as a stand alone GPS rcvr? That is, if I have an unlocked GSM, use a sim card ( from any source – country) then it will act as a normal GPS and not have a need for a server? I ask, as I am in and out of many countries and use (in the US) T-mobile, but buy top off cards, then when in Singapore buy a local sin card and top off cards. Would the N95 GPS work??

All

This is the way it works

Network looks at the cells around you and tells the N95 what sats to look for. in V12 of the firmware there is a new tool called A-GPS that transmits this cell information to a server for much faster positioning. With V12 in the UK I can get a lock indoors in less than 15 seconds.

Steve,

I have the V12 firmware.. did not make a massive difference to me, and indoors ? I’m amazed – what network are you on btw ?

Hi
Great post, thanks for writing this. I noticed that when I use Sports Tracker, even if there is a satellite connection, the photos do not get tagged with geo information. They only get tagged when I am using the Nokia GPS application. Has anyone else seen this?
Thank you

Leave a Reply to EdCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.