I recently posted about using the iPhone as a GPS tracking device. After doing more testing today I’ve come to the conclusion that using the iPhone (in its current state) for a traditional fleet tracking device is out of the question. Let me explain by first providing a visual:

The first thing you’ll notice is that the speed as displayed by our GPS tracking system is zero. The iPhone uses cellular triangulation to estimate the device’s current position. With that being said there’s no speed information that is accessible from the CoreLocation API. That doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be done, but currently its next to impossible.

If you look at the map image you’ll see a bunch of blips within a 2-3 mile radius of my house. I drove around today and frantically pushed the “Update Location” button within the Ublip iPhone application. You can see there’s no way to discern a real route between location readings. I had the thought of using Google’s directions API to get a route between two points, but I’m skeptical this will provide the level of detail necessary. I’ll be sure to post my findings once I run a few tests. Overall, the accuracy of location information isn’t bad if you need to know the whereabouts of your iPhone (or iPhone owner) and there’s still a few things I’ll be testing to improve the results.

I can think of a few circumstances where knowing the vicinity of the iPhone can prove useful, but most are consumer or socially oriented:

- Knowing the whereabouts of my friends and family

- Searching for businesses/information within a vicinity of the iPhone

- Geocaching: finding geocaches within a vicinity of the iPhone

- Publishing location information from the iPhone to FireEagle (this ties into the first item listed above)

- Geotagging: taking a photo and sending the whereabouts of the photo to Flickr (although there are more accurate ways to do this)

Those are just a few appliations that come to mind and I’m sure there are several others, none of which rely on GPS accuracy to the meter. I’ll be experimenting with sending location data to the Ublip system on an automated interval and share my findings here. For now I can press the “Update Location” button on a one minute interval while driving to work. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…..60 press. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5….60 press.