I'm nowhere near this location!

This morning I tried to use my iphone map function to check the distance between 2 points for milage and drive time. Imagine my surprise when my ‘current location’ was shown to be 117 miles from where I actually was!  The ‘wrong’ location was near where I used to live when I purchased both the phone and my original Micro-Cell box. (I’m now on my 2nd, box).

For those who don’t know, the ATT Micro Cell is a device you can purchase that acts like a mini cellular tower in your home. It connects to AT&T’s network via your existing broadband Internet service (such as DSL or cable) and is designed to support up to four simultaneous users. You receive improved cellular signal performance for both voice calls and data. The technology is generally know as Femtocell and several cell phone carriers have deployed it.

A little investigation revealed that the iphone uses a combination of cell phone tower triangulation AND the GPS receiver to lock on to your location, especially if your GPS signal is low because your iPhone can’t “see” the sky. I understand that it is called aGPS or assisted GPS. The only available 3G cell phone signal in my very rural home comes from my Micro-Cell box.

Some quick internet reading suggested that my iphone was relying on the 3G signal from the Micro-Cell to fix its location. To prove the theory I went into Settings on the iphone and turned 3G off. Next I went back to the map, and sure enough, after a minute or so it found my true location once the GPS locked on.

This is how far between the 2 locations

This is my real location

Turn off 3G in settings.

Admittedly this post is a little bit of “stating the obvious”. If you don’t have a good GPS fix then the iPhone uses what it has at its disposal to get as close as it can. However,  and this was the “teachable moment” for me, if a Micro Cell or other Femtocell is in use then , based on my experience, you can probably disregard the ‘current location’ result entirely . I wonder if the Micro Cell was using the known location of the internet server that it is connected to?

Regarding my experience with the Micro Cell, it has been less than pleasant. As discussed in the Wikipedia article, when the Micro Cell uses the existing DSL backhaul connection it must share the home bandwidth with all the other services such as email, web browsing and gaming. This leads to frequent disconnections of the Micro Cell and loss of 3G coverage. The 3G LED will blink while the service is lost. It may recover in minutes, or it can take hours or even an entire day. For me, this happens at least once per day often when nobody is even using the DSL. An outage once per week would be bad enough but daily outages are unacceptable and I am looking for an alternative solution. ATT tech supports best suggestion was to swap the box which didn’t improve the situation.

//Jon

Tags: AT&T, 3G, GPS, Micro Cell, Femtocell

WPtouch automatically transforms any WordPress blog into a better viewing experience for users of iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It detects the mobile device automatically and presents the mobile theme. There is a switch at the bottom of any mobile page that alows the user to turn off the mobile theme and revert to the normal one.

It has all the standard WordPress blog features such as search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. It also has links at the bottom of each article so you can email the article (link), post a link to some twitter clients, and post a link to some social bookmark sites. There is also a button to increase the fint size. The admin panel offers customization of these features and the options to add more.

Using optimized code, the WPtouch theme will also dramatically lower the download time for your blog resulting in a more pleasing viewing experience for mobile users.

Have an iphone? Load up this blog and give it a try.

5 stars!

//Jon

MORE: Since I posted this I have had the opportunity to test this device. It performs well even on areas with marginal 3G coverage. If you want to test one with no committment to a contract you can rent one for days or weeks. I rented one from Rovair.

State of the Art – With a Private MiFi Hot Spot, Be Online Wherever You Like – NYTimes.com

Pogoplug review: ”

When we first caught wind of the Pogoplug — a small box that essentially lets you turn any USB hard drive (and drives only) into a network device — we were pretty darn excited. Having a house full of disparate storage boxes and no easy way to connect to them made the prospect of the ‘plug seem very enticing. Not only does the Pogoplug make your drive accessible via your PC (with accompanying software), but it — we think more importantly — makes the drive accessible via a web front-end and an iPhone app. We finally had a chance to break one of these out and see how it performs, and our findings are below.

Continue reading Pogoplug review

Filed under: Storage, Networking

Pogoplug review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Apr 2009 12:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read’|’Permalink‘|’Email this‘|’Comments”

(Via Engadget.)

Cardboard Scandock turns your iPhone into a document scanner: “

High tech meets low tech with this simple corrugated cardboard stand, that makes capturing document images with your iPhone a snap. If you’ve ever attempted to scan a document by just holding up your phone, you’ll know that a blurry image is often the result. This simple stand created by University of Cincinnati DAAP student Kyle A Koch, is an elegant and green solution that holds both the phone and document in the perfect position to get a sharp capture. The stand comes flat packed for just $16 through the Ponoko design store.

Of course if you insist on something a bit more high tech, you could always make a scanner using Lego.

Ponoko, via Red Ferrett

“

(Via DVICE.)

It looks like chip-maker INTEL, who’s chips make almost all computers run, has entered the operating system market. They are providing a customized version of Linux, an open source operating system, to run on this new computing platform. This version is optimized to run efficiently with new class of Netbook microprocessor chips supplied by Intel, according to the article.

Intel hasn’t hasn’t really taken a shine to the idea of netbooks, since the low price point of the Atom processor they use doesn’t allow for very high profit margins. Well, it looks like Intel has realized that netbooks are here to stay because they’ve just taken the wraps off their own flavor of Linux optimized for the Atom processor: Moblin. Currently available as an alpha release, Moblin is built off of the GNOME Mobile platform and will utilize Intel’s own Clutter and GUPnP open source technologies. This is pretty exciting news since we just found out about another netbook-specific operating system: Jolicloud. At the very least, you probably won’t be seeing a lot of XP around soon.

link: Intel’s new OS for netbooks

(update, 1/9/09) And today the JKOntheRun.com blog had the answer on a video interview, “you can daisy chain as many USB devices as you want”.

Credit to Rafe Needleman from CNET while at the CES 2009 show in Las Vegas.

//Jon

Pogoplug puts any hard drive on the Internet | CES 2009 – CNET Blogs:

Home CNET CES 2009 January 7, 2009 9:00 PM PST Pogoplug puts any hard drive on the Internet Posted by Rafe Needleman

Here’s a cool little product that I can’t wait to try out: The Pogoplug. It’s a simple and relatively cheap box that plugs into an external hard drive (or flash drive) via USB, and also into you home’s Internet connection. Then it puts the hard drive on the Web as well as on your local network. Any computer in your home can access it as a shared drive, and people outside can also connect to it over the Web. It sounds like a very quick and simple way to put a whole bunch of files online for friends to see.

Pogoplug connects your USB drives to the Internet.Now, it’s no great feat for a geek to wire up a PC or a network-attached storage drive for Internet access. What the Pogoplug does is not utterly unique. The company is going for ease of use”

(Via CNET.)