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Posts: 1,455 | Thanked: 3,309 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Rochester, NY
#704
Originally Posted by petur View Post
woody14619, you might want to read up on A-GPS

What you are talking about is just celltower location based navigation, and while this info is used in A-GPS, it is not the same
Sorry to break this to you, but when Nokia says A-GPS in their menus, they're really talking about cell tower location triangulation. If you look at the settings menu, Nokia allows you to turn off GPS and leave "A-GPS" enabled in the settings. Given the technical definition you linked to, that's a nonsensical setting, since you can't have A-GPS without GPS by that definition. What you're actually getting in that mode (which is what we're talking about here) IS in fact cell tower location, since it's not turning on the GPS hardware.

Nokia had the option in PR1.0 to use "A-GPS", but it didn't actually seed the GPS chipset with the start location, so accurate GPS locks still took upwards of 20 seconds for most people. As of PR1.1 (or 1.1.1) they started seeding the GPS location if this setting was on. To this day they still send the raw A-GPS hit as an authoritative location (with a huge error margin) based on tower location until the GPS actually gives back it's first "valid" location.

So while technically it may not be correct to call that "A-GPS", I'm using the term because that's how Nokia has labeled cell tower triangulation in the settings menu. To be fair, Apple and a couple other vendors also use the term A-GPS (albeit incorrectly) to mean cell tower location that may or may not be feed to an actual GPS system as a seed for it's starting location.
 

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