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.
The 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.
There have been as we all know issues with the usability of applications, reliability of mobile networks and poor data rates and the problem I have often commented upon the “walled garden” mentality of the mobile operators.