November 24th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
If you happen to own a Verizon Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus, then you likely know the pain of Verizon’s intentional GPS crippling. The culprit, at least on the technology side of things, is that when looking for its position, webOS first turns to aGPS (cellular tower assisted GPS) to get a general location, and then looks to the sky for the more accurate triangulated positioning. Verizon’s aGPS for whatever reason was set such that unless you have a VZ Navigator subscription your aGPS data is locked down, but you still have a connection that the phone will continue to ping, looking for a response it isn’t going to receive. Eventually webOS gives up and turns to satellite GPS, but it takes long enough that users will give up rather than wait several minutes (or longer) for their location.
Intrepid PreCentral forum member Troy Miller may have found one workable solution, and it comes in our favorite form: a homebrew patch. His idea was to block the aGPS ping, such that the phone would ask for the general location from Verizon, not even get the metaphorical dial tone, and immediately move on to trying with standalone GPS. The patch that Miller put together forcibly redirects an aGPS request to an IP where it will get no response, thus tricking webOS into thinking there’s no available aGPS data (whereas before the phone would sit patiently and wait for Verizon to not respond). Of course, that means that you won’t get aGPS at all and will need a clear view of the sky, but at least your fix will come in more quickly.
Several forum members have tried out the patch with varying degrees of success, but now at least many are getting a precise GPS lock in a minute or two. This is a huge improvement over what Verizon Pre and Pixi owners have been living with, and at the very least should serve as a stepping stone to getting Verizon GPS working properly. Of course, if Verizon would just stop being big meanie poo poo heads we wouldn’t have to be bothering with this.
Source: PreCentral Forums; Thanks be to Troy!
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August 5th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Just the other day Palm pushed out a new app in the App Catalog called GPS Fix. The app, which aims to frequently ping the GPS system for fresh coordinates was designed to counteract whatever voodoo magic is preventing the Verizon Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus from providing accurate GPS data. The problem with those phones? For whatever reason, GPS is locked down on those phones, leaving VZ Navigator as the only app with unrestricted GPS access. Somehow, launching VZ Navigator (even without a subscription) magically enables other apps to access that GPS data.
Firing up one app to use another is obviously not an optimal solution, so that’s why developer James Harris whipped up GPS Fix. But even continual checking for fresh GPS data only can do so much before the phone craps out again and needs VZ Navigator to be launched again. James, being the awesome developer guy that he is, also whipped up a patch to supplement GPS Fix: GPS Fix for VZ Navigator.
The patch is fairly simple in concept and operation: it periodically launches VZ Navigator and then closes VZ Navigator. Due to the nature of webOS and VZ Navigator, a background session for VZ Navigator continues even after the app has been closed, allowing other GPS apps not authorized access on Verizon devices to piggyback off that service. Periodically pinging can keep the service alive, but even then it can still shut down without warning. Firing up VZ Navigator restarts the session and lets the ping-extending begin all over again.
So what’s the fuss about? James put the instructions for how to install the patch in his app, and Palm approved it as is. With all the caveats of ‘Palm doesn’t support or endorse homebrew,’ we supposed the Developer Relations team looked at that and said, “That’ll do,” and then fired up Preware and installed a few dozen patches. Okay, maybe it didn’t go quite like that, but do we need any more evidence of Palm’s continued acceptance and embrace of the homebrew community?
Source: GPS Fix
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