Cell Phone GPS

EBFoxbat · 09-13-2005, 09:20 PM

I'm scared to post about this because I feel like I may be opening a can of worms.

I have Sprint for a cell phone service. I have a Sanyo mm 7400. I was a passenger on a longish car ride and was bored out of my mind when I downloaded a new applicaion for my cell. It's called TeleNav. It's amazing!

Now everyone knows how much Nextel (yes I know it's now sprint/nextel but i'm talking hardware) touts their GPS equiped phones. Well most if not all 3g cell phones have GPS built in for E911 that supports emergancy locating.

Apparently TeleNav taps this and gives me a full gps navigation unit.

I assume this does not calculate my position based on cell towers as it can give a realtime speed which is accurate. It also does turn-by-turn, voice prompted (!) navigaation.

I'm not really sure how it works, as it seems to be OK with a limited view of the sky, which my hand-held GPS is not.

Does anyone think there maybe a way to extract raw GPS data from the phone? Perhaps a phone-side program who's job it is is to output NEMA (or whatever the GPS standard is) data.

I just think its neat. One could use the cell as a modem (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not post about that in this thread) and a GPS, oh yeah, and as a phone.

DRWeside · 09-13-2005, 09:27 PM

I had a similar brainfart a few hours ago. iDen phones need the serial cable connection for a computer to use it as a GPS receiver, but it does work as you think it should. I have no clue about your phone though.

EBFoxbat · 09-13-2005, 09:35 PM

Yeah but this isn't iDen stuff. iDen phones have been doing GPS for a while. to my knowledge, Sprint phones havn't done this yet. Now they do.

DRWeside · 09-13-2005, 09:38 PM

Actually, a friend of mine has a Sprint phone that has a compass as the screensaver. I don't know the make or model, but it's not a top of the line phone. I had noticed that it would display his bearing even in locations that he didn't have service, but it didn't really grab my attention to the point of asking about it.

I'll ask him about it tomorrow.

PURDooM · 09-13-2005, 09:51 PM

I read about that a few days ago when I was looking for a way to turn my sanyo into some kind of gps tracker to get the same effect as gpssecure.

Its too bad the tellenav service costs $10 per month just to run the software

I also cant run it on my sanyo rl4920

EBFoxbat · 09-14-2005, 06:45 AM

I should say, I don't know what kind of phones it can run on. Some prosessor intensive apps will only run on mm phones. I was thrilled to see it. I'm sure, like all other apps it will kill battery life.