Petition to Sprint to enable the GPS on the 6800

[Christopher Price]

There's a lot of FUD going on here, largely propagated by UTStarcom.

To date, no CDMA PDA/Phone has gpsOne enabled as an "open tap" for GPS solutions. Sprint didn't request something be disabled... that's wrong. To-date, no carrier has permitted gpsOne for consumer applications, so HTC has never fully implemented the serial link necessary.

There will be no "market drive" to implement a traditional GPS in CDMA phones. Verizon and Sprint are working on getting gpsOne to work for consumer GPS navigation in Windows Mobile, and that is where the applications will be used. HTC is not interested in adding GPS (on top of gpsOne) to CDMA units. Don't believe me? Spend 12 hours getting one of their product managers on the phone to ask them yourself.

Finally, don't trust a word that comes out of UTStarcom customer service emails. Nine times out of ten, they don't know what they're talking about when answering questions of this technical a nature.

[nuguy]

Ok, so there's no 'consumer drive', that's simply not true. If there was no consumer drive, why would carriers be spending so much ad $s on navigation subscriptions for much more basic phones? Because we have a pda and are more tech than an 'average phone user' would it be natural to expect us to want more or less tech in our phone????

EVERYONE is trained to expect this to not function.

You can find this debate going on all over the net, people DO want this. One nagging thing though... In every one of these debates (threads) someone says "Hey GPS on our PDA!" followed immediately by someone else "What are you serious, that doesn't work, that can't work, don't waste your time even thinking about it because it will NEVER EVER HAPPEN!"

Maybee if instead, everyone went to ONE petition, aimed at HTC they would see the 'consumer drive', and realise that it would give them a very marketable edge over their competitors.

It may not ever work, I know that, but I also know it CAN, and at least if things are being done PROactive, it gives us a chance at seeing this implimented sooner in some device.

People who demand nothing but the finest accuracy would still need a separate device. However it opens up a whole new world of location based services to many users that would otherwise be much later adopters.

[Christopher Price]

Consumers want GPS in their PDA, everyone knows that. HTC however will not waste $20-$50 per unit in R&D and adding the components to have not one, but two independent GPS systems into a single PDA.

You are much better off pushing Verizon and Sprint to accelerate their plans for gpsOne on Windows Mobile than demanding HTC add autonomous GPS to their CDMA devices, which they are not inclined to do.

By pushing Sprint/Verizon to add gpsOne support to Windows Mobile devices, they will in turn be more motivated to work with HTC and Motorola to develop gpsOne passthroughs... that actually pass through the data in a way an application can use (reading the FieldTest menu is great... but would take a lot of code to turn into a serial port wrapper).

Only one Sprint phone has autonomous GPS, that's the Sanyo 7050. And it's so buggy right now that both Sanyo and Sprint are wishing they had just left it with gpsOne to begin with.

[rawr]

HTC makes a device that has a GPS built in. It's called the P3300. Clearly HTC knows how to do it.

[aughsum]

havent we been over all of this already? I was under the impression that htc has unlocked the gpsone chip in one of its phones (hermes?) which made it work in standalone mode.. im not going to read through all the threads again but i thought this was common knowledge.

6800 needs to leave gps open. after spending what we are going to on this phone it would be nice to not have to purchase redundant equiptment, and it would be nice to not have to carry said equiptment around with us.

[PocketPcUser]

Originally Posted by [b

aughsum[/b] Clearly]6800 needs to leave gps open. after spending what we are going to on this phone it would be nice to not have to purchase redundant equiptment, and it would be nice to not have to carry said equiptment around with us.

I think that this is the best way to put it. However, I am unsure of how this will turn out. The carriers simply don't want to have to provide support for this added feature. Remember when the 6700 first came out? How about when the Blackberry came out? These were some new components that the carriers would have to train and teach their techs about and it is a long process. Think about when an emergency occurs and someone knows that their device has GPS and their child has it as well. They might be calling Sprint, or Verizon instead of 911 first just to see how to check on them to make sure they are safe. They in turn may become responsible or under so much stress because of the situations that they are put under...

BTW, remember that phone that was out that had the ability to track down a child? That phone isn't out anymore is it? It wasn't even out for 1 year or so. Maybe we can look at how well that program worked and base our hopes off of that.

Andrew,

[69L46]

The PPC 6700 has a gpsone chip. This can use cell towers or GPS satellites to get GPS info. For more accuracy, the phone can get a GPS almanac from a carrier server and/or use cell tower information to assist the GPS location determination.

All carriers are required to have E911 GPS service, so however it does it, it can determine location. The questions are:

1) how to enable the GPS outside of E911
2) how to set it up in a mode that does not require access to the carrier location server (which provides the almanac) or determine the IP address and port number for the server (there are 2 standard ports 6062 and 8889 which may or may not be used for this)
3) how to get the GPS data accessible to WM5/WM6 OS - this would probably require a hack to the radio ROM (see the Qualcomm block diagram of the MSM6500 chipset - the GPS antenna signal goes through the radio unit before getting to the GPSOne chip).

HTC could have neglected to write the radio-to-OS link or disabled it for Sprint. However, since they enabled it for the P3600, it appears that at this point they have a GPSOne-WM5 connection available. Hopefully they will roll it out to Sprint, but I doubt that Sprint would make it available (just like WM6).

QPST can program the GPSOne mode and the IP address and port. However, it does not provide a COM port to talk to WM5. I assume that would have to be in the radio ROM

Also, using older ROMs (before wmodem was disabled) you can use hyperterminal to talk to the modem with AT commands, but all the modem does is respond with OK even to invald commands. If that is on the driver side of things, it may be able to stop the modem from being mute and you could use the CDMA GPS AT commands to see if the GPS data is presented to that interface without E911.

[B18DelSolT]

Does the 8800 have a gps antenna also?

[nuguy]

http://www.ppcgeeks.com/possible-agp...700-t4462.html

the p3600 is the phone in question. It has the same GPSone as the 6700 and 6800 and originally came without GPS support - THIS IS possible. I realise it will be unlikely to happen without an HTC buyin, being as the opened it on the above device, I think they are the key here. Not the individual carriers.

[Raging Idiot]

They will integrate a full functioning GPS in future releases... REGARDLESS of the "how". It is of course all market driven.

That is the point I believe we are all wanting to achieve.

If I was to make a raging idiot guess on the "why" as for "why not already" then I'd say it is likely because at some point the cost effectiveness was not favorable. Perhaps the carriers couldn't negotiate a deal with the manufacturer, or perhaps there wasn't enough competition to effect the supply/demand at that time.

Now that there is more competition raising the bar there is now more incentive for this to happen regardless of any petition or effort we enact.