The Gingerbread Trails

After optimising Android 2.1 (Éclair) to the nth degree we decided to take the leap and trail Android 2.3.2 (Gingerbread) due to its alleged GPS performance improvements on the Samsung Galaxy S. Because Samsung have yet to release the official update to Android 2.2 (Froyo) for our particular device let alone the new Gingerbread firmware, we were forced to go with an official yet unreleased firmware and flash it onto the device using Odin 1.7.

After an initial scare where the phone became temporarily bricked due to Samsung Keis processes still running in the background of my computer, we were able to recover the update and the phone booted up in the new OS. Aside from all the shiny new improvements the stock GPS settings were very similar to the optimisations which I had previously applied under Éclair.

Prior to the upgrading to Gingerbread, Éclair on the Galaxy S was tested alongside Éclair running on the Sony Xperia and confirmed not only that the GPS on the Xperia was infinitely better, but that we had achieved an enormous improvement with the Galaxy S over its stock GPS files and default factory configuration. When we reached the location the Xperia remained locked to the position while the Galaxy S would drift 5-15m, this was an enormous improvement over the 100m drift we experienced originally.

For the Gingerbread trails we went to the extra effort of developing a web application using the Google Maps API's to trace the journey (images of this will be up soon.) We also added upon the location test we had developed to trigger event messages once we got within range of the destination location. What we found was that the accuracy hasn't changed much while the refresh rate seems to have suffered slightly. One big improvement however was we no longer received error messages if the device lost its position, so from a usability perspective Gingerbread seems more desirable. We will be performing further tests today and will be posting some traced maps so stay tuned!