Geekonomics

The most puzzling application on the iPod touch, the iPhone's sister

Nov 9, 2008 19:39

I sold my iPhone 3G on the first day I bought it because it's a really lousy phone.

However, the user interface and brand new set of apps coming through the Apple Developer program got me interested enough to get an Apple iPod touch 2nd generation instead, which is really like the iPhone 3G without the phone functions (which I hated) and it's been really interesting so far!

So interesting, in fact, that it comes with maps and location-based services? It REALLY puzzled me that Apple would want to add a GPS module into this gadget, so I looked up the technical specs and, strangely enough, location-based services are listed but there's no GPRS or GPS found anywhere.

This was turning out to be really weird. So I fired up maps on the iPod touch and, after a while, they actually did tell me that my current location was East Coast, although around 800-1,000m off my actual location.

Now, how in the world did they manage to do that?

The only possibility I can think of is the Wi-Fi services. But that's impossible. Still, I checked around the Web and there are people saying that, yes, Apple has actually gone out of the way to do some kind of Wi-Fi triangulation to provide location-based services on the iPod touch.

That's sounds out of this world, really. I actually researched into Wi-Fi triangulation years back in the 802.11b days, but it's really more for indoors than outdoors use, if it even works. But this actually worked on my iPod touch on a maps application.

Eventually, I found the most logical answer. Location-based services on the iPod touch is "provided through a database of known IP numbers for known Internet service providers, which are often allocated geographically". Which basically means this takes the IP address of the Wi-Fi access point you are connected to, maps it against the database, and tries to determine your nearest location. Nice.

This is even more innovative than the multitouch and accelerometer that the iPod touch comes with, if you ask me. That's what iPhone has done for the rest of the world. Although it has one of the lousiest phones I've ever seen, Apple sure brought some of the world's best and most innovative apps developers to the mobile market.

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