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iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

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Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#111

Post by cantSpellSober »

TedShiller wrote: post #106
ashirviskas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my 2 year old Android device already had a feature that was only now implemented by Apple in their top of the line products. Neat. Does anyone have personal experience of how dual-frequency improves GPS? As I'm not really using GPS a lot, I'm not sure I noticed a difference from my previous devices (I live in EU, so also no high rise skyscrapers here)

my 1999 honda civic has a feature that my Porsche 911 doesn't have. doesn't mean my Porsche 911 is a worse car

Clearly it's a worse car WRT to that feature.

Besides the high price of iPhones, this metaphor doesn't go very far.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#112

Post by cantSpellSober »

m3kw9 wrote: post #54
ashirviskas wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So my 2 year old Android device already had a feature that was only now implemented by Apple in their top of the line products. Neat. Does anyone have personal experience of how dual-frequency improves GPS? As I'm not really using GPS a lot, I'm not sure I noticed a difference from my previous devices (I live in EU, so also no high rise skyscrapers here)

Android has copy and paste before iOS but you wouldn’t want to brag about it just because. It didn’t work well at all till iOS came out with their implementation

Great point, Android's swipe-able keyboard was VERY good before Apple copied it. Brag about that because it was good, not "just because."

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#113

Post by ksec »

chrismeller wrote: post #110
ksec wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considered that I follow hardware development fairly closely, I didn't even know this was not a thing on iPhone. And now Apple is making a big deal about it. Could anyone shares any thoughts as to why Apple only include it now? And not earlier?

Including it on a spec sheet qualifies as making a big deal about it?

They actually mentioned it during the presentation.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#114

Post by osigurdson »

rnk wrote: post #98
sorenjan wrote: post #80

Xiaomi released a phone with dual frequency GNSS in 2018 (with the Broadcom BCM4775 chipset), and as far as I know most Android phones have had it since then, or maybe a bit later. If you want to see if your phone supports it, try GPSTest. Garmin has recently released several watches with it as well, both their high end models and some more affordable ones. They also have an auto mode that switches it on or off depen…

Quoted post unavailable.

It interesting how Apple has been able to stay ahead while often being a step or two behind from a technological standpoint (in some areas at least). I think it goes to show how important it is to have things work in a very seamless way.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#115

Post by lucb1e »

snovv_crash wrote: post #47
antegamisou wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dual frequency mitigates the ionospheric delay error of GPS signals, yielding more accurate measurements.

This. Adding a second channel means that without RTK/PPK you can get ~30cm precision. The rest is just technical details.

For others who are not into that lingo, RTK/PPK are Real-Time and Post-Processed Kinematics. I had an idea of what the word kinematics means (Wikipedia says "describes the motion of [(groups of)] points") so this sounds like you use the accelerometer and gyroscope in addition to GNSS to get better accuracy, but actually no this has nothing to do with measuring your motion. Instead, RTK is something about signals' phase and requires an additional ground station (sounds similar to differential GPS, but by looking at phase data rather than position offset?), and PPK is never mentioned on Wikipedia and I don't understand descriptions from other sources. Post-processing is mentioned in differential GPS, however, to make the difference between the two topics (DGPS, RTK/PPK) even more confusing.

If you could elaborate, I'd be interested. It seems very specialistic (though you drop it as if it should be obvious) so I doubt most people here know the terms.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#116

Post by pilif »

sorenjan wrote: post #80

Xiaomi released a phone with dual frequency GNSS in 2018 (with the Broadcom BCM4775 chipset), and as far as I know most Android phones have had it since then, or maybe a bit later. If you want to see if your phone supports it, try GPSTest. Garmin has recently released several watches with it as well, both their high end models and some more affordable ones. They also have an auto mode that switches it on or off depen…

Apple has supported GNSS since the iPhone 8/X generation in 2017. This is about L5 GPS which I'm not sure how well this is supported in general ATM as its pretty new

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#117

Post by cantSpellSober »

TedShiller wrote: post #107
m3kw9 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android has copy and paste before iOS but you wouldn’t want to brag about it just because. It didn’t work well at all till iOS came out with their implementation

yep, everytime Apple makes a feature actually useable, all the android people come out furious. my guess is android people also use windows, and are used to constant blue screens, malware, and random crashes.

Yep, it's been days since 0days were exploited by malware in OSX. I still keep using it for some reason. Wish it would work with Android the way my linux boxes do! Even Win11 has some crapware that links it to my phone, sigh.

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#118

Post by lucb1e »

theshrike79 wrote: post #42
tosh wrote: post #4

afaiu this also means that every non-Ultra Apple watch will benefit from dual-frequency GPS when paired with an iPhone 14

Even iPads using an iPhone as a tether will use the iPhone GPS for location =)

Huh that sounds odd. Doesn't a tablet have a bigger battery than a phone?

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#119

Post by lucb1e »

ricardobeat wrote: post #5

Support for Galileo and Glonass was touted maybe a decade ago, but there was never any massive improvement in accuracy. Same story? Even worse, Apple Maps still freezes after I leave a tunnel - I’ve been through at least 3 different models in the meantime.

> Support for Galileo and Glonass was touted maybe a decade ago

I bought a new phone in 2021 and it newly touted Galileo support but when actually opening up GPSTest, there were no satellites. On the forums, it turns out nobody could receive any Galileo. This isn't something that has been around for very long as of today, and when it's advertised, it might not even work.

Also, "As of 2012, [Galileo] was scheduled to have 15 satellites operational in 2015 and reach full operation in 2020" (Wikipedia). The first satellite had been launched only a year prior, 2011. This really wasn't a thing yet, a decade ago.

GLONASS is something my previous phone (Huawei, Feb 2017, €240) could reliably receive along with BeiDou, so that has been around a bit longer.

The difference between my GPS-only 2012 phone and the Huawei was night and day. Multiple minutes to find a fix versus mere seconds, both under reasonable conditions next to a window (both lying on the windowsill, started searching for a fix at the same time). Whether that's due to GLONASS and BeiDou or if the GPS chip itself also made a leap, I don't know, but yes this has gotten a lot better and it's definitely noticeable as a regular user, if you use GNSS specifically.

Probably you haven't noticed because phones, by default at least, upload WiFi identifiers around them to Google/Apple which then return a location, so in both cases you get a fairly good position within whatever your ping time to goopple is, and goopple gets a nice map of users' locations in return. (Or to Mozilla, if you modified your phone to use MLS instead. I tried it once, was nice, but a hassle to set up so my current phone doesn't have it anymore.)

Re: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS

#120

Post by Nappes »

sorenjan wrote: post #80

Xiaomi released a phone with dual frequency GNSS in 2018 (with the Broadcom BCM4775 chipset), and as far as I know most Android phones have had it since then, or maybe a bit later. If you want to see if your phone supports it, try GPSTest. Garmin has recently released several watches with it as well, both their high end models and some more affordable ones. They also have an auto mode that switches it on or off depen…

The speedup you are noticing is probably mostly due to assisted gps, where your phone gets a location using - partial gps information + wifi location + cell tower location all triangulated. Your eg early 2010 car gps unit didn't have any of the addition ways to speed up the location fix
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