The battery of my Android phone died.
I eventually bought a replacement. My main use case for this thing is
GPS tracking of my walks, so I don't really "need" a smartphone. It's
mostly just an expensive toy.
If there were still dedicated GPS devices available, I would have bought
one of those. But this doesn't exist anymore. This market has been
killed off completely by smartphones. And the few dedicated GPS devices
that still exist are just as expensive as a phone.
Sadly, the GPS chip in that new phone was pretty bad. It took ages to
get a fix and, when it did, the accuracy was just as bad. I took several
walks with a second phone / GPS tracker for comparison, so I'm more or
less sure that it wasn't due to the weather or landscape.
Only while trying to "debug" this issue, I came across this Android app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.gpstest
https://github.com/barbeau/gpstest
I mention this because the author of this app has started an initiative
to crowd-source information about GPS chips and capabilities in Android
phones:
https://bit.ly/gpstest-device-database
And *that* is pure gold.
By using this database and a bit of searching the web, I found another
phone (by the same manufacturer, funny enough) in the same price range
but with a different GPS chip. It arrived today, I gave it a quick shot
and it appears to work much, much better.
The manufacturers themselves just say that their phones have "GPS", but
no mention which chip it is or what it can do. Really annoying. Had I
not known about the aforemention database, I would have needed to
blindly buy several phones and give them a try. What a waste.
