[wildpig]

Just want to give everyone an update on GPS between TP1 and TP2 by my experience. If everyone else has something else to add, please do. I believe that this is an important part of TP2 and TP1 since both these devices' GPS are an important part of the phones and deserving a fair amount of attention.

My new TP2 GPS is day and night better than my old TP1 GPS. Whether because this is due to TP2 built date of April 2010 (relatively late model even for TP2 since TP2 was introduced at least 6 months ago) as compared to my TP1 built date of Nov 08 (early built right when TP1 was introduced) is hard to say since I don't have a real early model TP2 or a late model TP1 to confirm, but it's very possible that a hardware bug is at work in my TP1 and possibly also other people with problem with their TP2.

Having said the above, my TP2 GPS works great even without any assistance from quickgps or cell tower. It got at least 6-7 sat locked just standing next to the window. Moving back more to the middle of my room about 10 ft from window it still maintains steady lock on at least 6 sats. And I mean rock steady sat locks. This is better than my Mio C320

I actually downgraded my TP2 to 6.1 ROM to test something else. While at it, before going back to 6.5 rom, I tested the GPS and it was also working, possibly slightly slower at getting sat signals but it did lock on to at least 5-6 sat within 5 mins. I did notice that the GPS driver files in WM 6.1 for TP2 is of different size compared to that of 6.5 rom. So there could be some possible small improvement of GPS between 6.1 and 6.5 rom? Regardless, even with 6.1 rom, GPS on my TP2 is definitely very good. This would tend to rule out the fact that the GPS improvement is mostly due to the software. In another word, if someone has a TP2 and their GPS is crappy even with quickgps and cell signal, be real suspicious that you could have a broken GPS if you already try to restore rom back.

I had a TP1 which I got like when it first came out back in Nov 08. It has a real POS GPS which doesn't have enough sensitivity to lock on to anything even outside most of the time and even quickgps doesn't help a lot of time. Even when the quickgps data was uptodate and with tower signals, it still keeps losing sat lock on and off causing the indicated position to jitter on and off every other second nonstop. I think a lot of people got this problem too. I have a feeling that it could have been the GPS chip on my TP1 was bad (possibly due to early built). Possibly later TP1 GPS is fixed? It would be nice if someone with later built of TP1 or anyone with TP1 w/ GPS working real nicely can comment? Also I did notice that the GPS driver files on my TP1 is different size compared to GPS drivers on TP2 even when I downgrade my TP2 rom to 6.1. I guess I could try to see if i can transfer the same driver files from TP2 over to the old TP1 to see if it makes any difference, but I doubt it.

I guess the other possibility is that the GPS chip in TP2 is completely different from TP1. I thought that they might be the same since both of these have very similar HW. Would be good if someone knows more than me about this can confirm or not that TP2 and TP1 use the same GPS chip.