In a couple of previous posts I used the term “iPhone GPS” and then went on to describe that it’s accomplished through doing cell tower triangulation. Let me state that I’m well aware that there’s no GPS chip inside of the iPhone, but for the purposes of my posts I state “iPhone GPS” meaning that the iPhone can get it’s current position (regardless of whether it uses satellites or not). Okay, with that being said I’d like to share some more of my recent discoveries.

Previously, I stated that the iPhone is not a viable solution for GPS tracking for several reasons. Right now, I’d like to ignore the current limitations of the OS (app can’t be started automatically and run in the background) and focus on retrieving the device’s current location. This is done with limited accurancy, but I’ve explicitly coded our iPhone tracking application to provide the most accurate readings as possible. There’s also a property that can be set to tell the device to report continuously when it moves.

If you’re unaware, we sell GPS tracking products for small fleets and families. All Ublip employees have a fleet tracking device installed in their car and we track each other 24/7 (because we’re geeks like that). This morning as I drove to work I decided to compare the accuracy of the iPhone’s GPS to our fleet tracking device. The Ublip fleet tracking device reports several times a minute while moving and I only let the iPhone report once/minute. This was done manually so there were a couple instances where I missed the mark. When I got to work I logged into our web application and compared my car’s breadcrumbs to those of my iPhone. Here are the results:

The red blip represents our office, where my trip ended. You can see the consistency of reports (evenly spaced) from our fleet tracking device, while the iPhone was somewhat spotty (due to human error). At a quick glance you’ll notice that the breadcrumb trails in both cases are very similar. We’ll be working to continuously improve our iPhone tracking application as well as continue to test against a more accurate and reliable device. With that being said I’m more optimistic about the possibilities of using the iPhone as a GPS tracking device, but this is only one part of the equation. There are still many, many things to figure out.

What do you think? Based on the image above does the iPhone provide enough detail for the types of applications you would use?