Thursday, December 24, 2009

Monday, December 21, 2009

iphone/ipod touch location services

Well... it seems that Apple use Skyhook to do more accurate location based services than I expected.
I always thought the iPhone 3G simply used A-GPS and cell triangulation to determine your position - yet it was wildly accurate INSIDE my office....
turns out they use Wireless Location services - Skyhook have a massive database (using wardriving) of all the MAC addresses of wifi access points, and use this to determine your geographical location (in combination with GPS, A-GPS and cell triangulation),
heck, they even pay drivers to wardrive around the world.

Coverage is mostly densely urban europe, north america, australia and some asia (tokyo-osaka, HK, taipei, seoul, bangkok, beijing).