About this time last year, I bought a Garmin GPS for my car. It was a very worthwhile purchase; it made finding clients’ homes significantly easier, helped me get myself “unlost” more than once, and I even brought it along on the trip to Ireland my brothers and I took last March. When it got stolen out of my car back in the fall, I was quite unhappy to lose it, and very pleased when Bridget bought me a new one for Christmas.
One of the few criticisms I have about car GPSes is that they’re all but useless once you get into a built-up city. If there was ever a city where drivers needed GPS, it’s Boston, with its 17th-century tangle of narrow, irregular streets, but the tall buildings downtown block the satellite signals and after listening to the computerized voice say “Recalculating!” for the umpteenth time in two minutes, you might as well shut the thing off. It does work a bit better in other parts of the city, where the sky is a bit more open, but it can be spotty. I can’t see how you could use them at all in Manhattan or the Loop or any other metropolis with lots of skyscrapers.
So, there has to be a better way of helping you pinpoint and track locations when you’re at street level in most major American cities. One of the initial features of the Apple iPhone was its ability to locate you using coordinate data from cellular towers and plot you onto a Google map. The latest software updates to the iPhone improve on this system by also adding in the ability to detect and triangulate from WiFi networks at known physical coordinates. The one outstanding difficulty of using WiFi triangulation alone is that hotspots are not always associated with physical locations permanently, the way a cellular tower is, and so there will need to be quite a bit of regular surveying done to find, map, and maintain databases of hotspots.
In my dream world, the next generation of GPS units will integrate all three technologies and seamlessly switch between them, choosing whichever set of signals is strongest. Similarly, the next-gen iPhones should include an actual GPS receiver and do the same sort of on-the-fly signal comparison.
I used a GPS gizmo while in the Bay Area last weekend and I was wow’d by it. The only other GPS experience I have is a small hand held version that is silent and one we use for geocaching. I like the suggestions you make. Why don’t you write to Garmin?