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by dedward 5532 days ago
My understanding is hte iPhone doens't actually have a GPS receiver in it at all. It only uses a fuzzily defined "assisted GPS" which is basically based completely on 3g towers.

They don't use the GPS satellites at all.

1 comments

AGPS is GPS satellites assisted by cell towers, and is in the iPhone 3G onwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

The original iPhone had no GPS and always used cell tower triangulation. This varied a lot - I remember in Manhattan, NY it could track me almost to the street number; on the other hand I once turned it on in a moving car in rural NSW, Australia and it drew a circle approximately 500km in diameter.