[jdwx]

Ok... Alltel 8830 4.2.2.123 Bought and never installed a paid GPS service.

GPS did not work in BB Maps or Google Maps at all.

I installed Nav4All and "it" worked. Suddenly Google maps started working... sorta... As did BBmaps... Well, sorta. Sorta means, it seems that if I go into Nav4All "first" and stay in it, Google and Bb maps generally work perfectly.

Here and there Nav4All doesnt always "quite" work right either, but it usually does.

If I dont use nav4All, and I just go straight into Google maps first, sometimes it would NAIL where I was outside, like within 6 meters. Other times, it would show me within "1700 meters" or "5000 meters". I assumed the latter two were celltower triangulations (at home they put me in the same wrong spot religiously). But the "within 6 meters" one was exactly accurate as to where I was.

Also, going directly into BBmaps without having started Nav4All, it won't be able to acquire satelites at all, ever. It sits for a long time never gets them. It will get them after Nav4All opens and gets them first. It then works fine as well.

Any thoughts on all this?

Why does the GPS seems intermittantly available?

[JRSCCivic98]

This was confirmed a long time ago with Alltel. All you have to do is install their nav software and activate it once. After that, you can cancel and keep the working GPS.

Be sure you have version 2.2.0 of Google Maps. That version is the one that got fixed to work properly with the 8830 aGPS APIs.

Oh yeah, as to why sometimes after a while GMM stops talking to the GPS system, that's because the chipset turns itself off to save power, but the current version of GMM doesn't have a reliable way to initiate the startup on it again. Perhaps the next release will have a "Start GPS" function on it like Blackberry Maps does.

[jdwx]

Yeah, I'd heard that.

Although I never installed their software or activated GPS through them.

Curiously, Nav4All, (the program that seemed to unlock its GPS) is a free non Alltell program and it made the GPS suddenly work.

Ahhh... I have Google Maps 2.1Ready to upgrade now.


Thank you for your thoughts on this!