I've read a lot of negative reviews regarding the inbuilt gps on the n810, and I have to say I agree with most of the criticism. However I found a solution that stabilizes and more importantly, adds a lot of reliability and consistancy to the gps. I installed the program carman, and it comes with it's own control manual entry. Clicking on that brings up the normal gps icon in the tray, as well as a new carman icon. However what I found that was so great about this icon, was it stabilizes the gps, as well as offers it's own gpsd server functionality. So that simplifies matters, a lot. The gpsd app that is in the apt-get tree had a very nifty icon with satalite positions and strength, however it was in no way compatable with the gps inbuilt into the control panel. However, many programs look for gpsd before the native gps service. Basically, you could be running one, but not the other. Needless to say, I spent many minutes standing outside with my unit in my hand waiting for a fix, which was never going to come. But with the carman icon, it offers up fast timely gps information to every single gps app I have going (all of them, right now). Today it was almost completely cloudless, a very beautiful day, and oftentimes inside buildings I was getting a good gps reading, and just stepping outside both gps apps I was using to track instantly got a great fix.
I went ahead and ordered a $45 bluetooth gps dongle that supposedly finds a fix very fast and is better than the inbuilt n810 chip, and I'm looking forward to testing and comparing. However, simply by installing carman I found the n810 built-in gps to be surprisingly functional.
Running 2 gps tracking programs with realtime map information and a last.fm radio player streaming from the dun bluetooth on my cellphone, I had 3 hours of fun laundry/walking around town. Guess if I want to do a 4-5 hour walk I'm going to have to figure out a way to conserve battery life. Can just use sansa for music, only 1 gps app, and like hardly ever use n810, but still having a load of fun with n810 it's a pretty nifty little thingy-bob. 3-4 hours battery life is pretty decent considering. Also you can underclock the cpu to save even more power. In any case, thought I'd do a little write up because I haven't read anywhere about anyone having installed carman and it fixing all their gps woes. To the contrary, mostly seen people discounting the internal gps. I will try to write up a little comparison once my helix bluetooth gps unit arrives.
I went ahead and ordered a $45 bluetooth gps dongle that supposedly finds a fix very fast and is better than the inbuilt n810 chip, and I'm looking forward to testing and comparing. However, simply by installing carman I found the n810 built-in gps to be surprisingly functional.
Running 2 gps tracking programs with realtime map information and a last.fm radio player streaming from the dun bluetooth on my cellphone, I had 3 hours of fun laundry/walking around town. Guess if I want to do a 4-5 hour walk I'm going to have to figure out a way to conserve battery life. Can just use sansa for music, only 1 gps app, and like hardly ever use n810, but still having a load of fun with n810 it's a pretty nifty little thingy-bob. 3-4 hours battery life is pretty decent considering. Also you can underclock the cpu to save even more power. In any case, thought I'd do a little write up because I haven't read anywhere about anyone having installed carman and it fixing all their gps woes. To the contrary, mostly seen people discounting the internal gps. I will try to write up a little comparison once my helix bluetooth gps unit arrives.
7 comments:
Very interesting. Did you try Maemo Mapper with the Carman fix? You should get good GPS performance with a bluetooth GPS reciever without Carman.
Wow! Thank you very much! This makes the gps finally useable... i need to check with maemo mapper but at least i can get a gps fix at all! i only hope they integrate whatever makes this possible into Mer...
Did it help you too, MeyerK? Feels good to leave a blog entry that wasn't dumb for a change, if it helped a little bit. George, yeah, the two programs I usually run are maemo mapper and ecoach. Kinda on the fence about qtmapper, and navit needs maps yet, but was surprised that all the gps apps didn't have a problem.
BTW, was surprised to see Amazon shipped the Holox in 2 days. Next time I boot I won't load the carman icon, and try out Maemo Mapper. The bluetooth GPS receiver gets a fix very quickly. You'd think you'd be saving some battery by not having the gps chip turned on all the time, too.
Ever since the AGPS tool came out I haven't had much of a problem with the N810. I frequently get a lock within 30secs and most of that is the time making the connection via my phone.
The external Nokia GPS I had was terrible. It usually took more than 5 minutes to get a lock and rarely got more than 4 satellites. The N810 usually has 6 or more.
What bluetooth GPS dongle did you get and How well did it work?
I got a Holox M-1000. It's pretty awesome, have pretty much completely forgot about the internal gps in the n810. Just have to remember to turn on the Holox about 10 minutes before I leave to get accuracy :) It's way more accurate really :) Plus it has looong battery life, they say 23 hours but I know I've gone over that once. In any case over half the unit is battery and all it's doing is gps and bluetooth so :) Very happy with it. Works great with the Carman icon I was talking about in post or with other util and system options.
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