iPad Surprise

Yesterday Stefan surprised us with two iPad’s he managed to acquire from Victoria University for use in this project. We were incredibly grateful to be able to make use of them as we now have enough devices for tomorrow’s final test.

The devices needed SIM cards before we could test them and today Stefan came around to the office to pick up the new SIM cards with me. Within a few minutes the SIMs were activated and we were up and running. Stefan dashed off to pick up two more iPhones for tomorrows test leaving me to test our shiny new devices.

Now the team are not known for being big fans of Apple products and we didn’t think too much of the iPads at first. That was until I got them out onto the street to find out what their made of. I was instantly blow away by the lightning speed with which the device found and connected to a satellite, it was literally seconds as opposed to the minute or two we would sometimes wait for the mobiles to connect. I dismissed this performance as being a result of a hot start, Apple being the company they are was probably already tracking the device from the instant we turned it on.

I was now walking towards the first location when I received the next big shock. While the mobile devices updated the location between 10 and 30 seconds apart the iPad was updating every second! The GPS reception didn’t drop out even once and the distance remained consistent all the way to the destination. When I got there I was able to get to within a meter of the coordinates. I guess all that extra space came in handy and Apple decided to put a real GPS antenna inside the device. While I’m no more impressed by the device over all, the GPS performance was second to none, the best I have seen to date.