I just came back from a three-week backpacking holiday. My plan was to test Ubuntu Touch by carrying my MX4 as my primary phone, falling back to an iPhone 4 when necessary. That plan lasted about a day and a half. After that I used the iPhone and rarely bothered with the MX4.
I have a long list of bugs to file, but the deal-breaker was GPS. I absolutely rely on GPS when travelling. But GPS on Ubuntu Touch basically didn't work at all. To the point where I don't even know if or how it's supposed to work. Maybe someone can enlighten me, point me to the existing bug reports? My main point of comparison is my old Nokia N900 running Maemo, with Mappero. Mappero was hugely frustrating but is leaps and bounds ahead of anything on Ubuntu. First of all, GPS doesn't seem to work when the phone is offline. Is this a known issue? Is it hardware related at all? The iPhone performed very well, especially with Here Maps. One interesting way it beat Mappero is that Mappero would only show me a location once it had got a full fix, whereas Here Maps quickly gives me a circle at least a few tens of kilometers across. That's actually useful, for example when you suddenly wake up because the night bus has stopped and you need to know if it's your stop or not. Second, the main map app I'm using is OSMTouch. If I open that app it doesn't seem to automatically turn on GPS. I have to separately turn it on in the notifications area. This is surely not how it's supposed to work, right? There are huge problems with OSMTouch, but the reason I'm using that one is that it at least caches map tiles for offline use. Possibly other apps work better, but without offline functionality they're all irrelevant to me. However, with OSMTouch, even when I'm online and I get a fix I can't zoom to my current location. After tapping the pin icon, often as not I get a message like "geolocation failed". It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. There's very little feedback as to what the problem is. OSMTouch's offline tile caching also doesn't actually work reliably enough to be useful. I deliberately focus on a map I'd like to keep, then quit the app. When I next load that map many of the tiles are missing - seemingly at random. I haven't found any map app that allows me to pin points of interest and keep them. Even if there are no actual maps GPS can still be useful this way, for example noting down the location of the hotel or park entrance so you can always find your way back. I definitely shouldn't have to be online for this - that's the one area where Here maps is a complete failure. Coming back to offline GPS use, I've used that on a bunch of devices now. The thing is, it's always slow to get a fix. Have you ever had that thing where you're lost, in a dodgy neighbourhood, in a country where you don't speak the language, and it's kinda dark, and you're holding your phone up above your head trying to get a good GPS fix, and you're wondering if your phone will notice the satellites before the local muggers notice your phone? I get that a lot. In that situation, what I want to know is should I stay still another minute hoping to get a fix, or should I just walk somewhere else and see if the reception is better? What I liked about Mappero is that it gave me some insight into what was going on, in the form of a bar chart of the signal strength from each satellite. If there are only four or five bars, time to move on. If there are eight or nine bars and they're reasonably strong, give it a minute and it'll have a fix. I was able to use this to figure out that standing still works best. Any feedback at all allows you to at least experiment, rather than just "geolocation failed". Is there any API in Ubuntu Touch that exposes this information? Is it even possible with the chipsets being used? Even better should be possible: I know that there is an "ephemeris" which needs to be downloaded from the satellite, or the internet if available. I'd love to be able to see the status of this data too, since this is surely much of the reason for the delay. Like, a progress meter of the download, which location it's for, how stale it is etc. Is there an API for that? Of course all of this is stuff that should sit under the covers and not bother the user. But when you really need GPS, you GODDAMN REALLY NEED IT. My worst case was being in a national park, trapped, alone, soaked, face bleeding, on the wrong side of a river, and sobbing into a phone begging for help from a lodge owner who spoke really good Russian and Kyrgyz but not that great English. Admittedly I never managed to tell him the location that my N900 was efficiently reporting, but at least I knew where I was ;-) Anyway, GPS is so important to me while travelling that I usually carry two GPS devices in case I lose one. But I'm not willing to carry three phones with me. If things haven't dramatically improved by the next time I go travelling I'll just have to reflash my MX4 with Flyme. -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
