Life Without Data: qGPS

Data is an ever more pervasive part of the smartphone experience. But the cost of data plans are still generally massive, sometimes costing as much as your voice plan. So Life Without Data is a Tips and Tricks feature to help you get around the cost of data plans.

Straight up GPS is slow. It reaches out to four satellites to grab all the information it needs to give you a fix on your position, and that takes time. aGPS was designed to give you a fix more quickly by grabbing some of the information you need over your phone's data connection instead of using the GPS radio alone. If you're trying to get by without an expensive data plan, aGPS could be running per-kb charges, or it might be completely unavailable to you.

Fear not, because there's another way to speed up GPS fixes: Quick GPS. Instead of requiring 4 satellites to get a fix, qGPS makes it possible to get a fix with just three. To wit, it does so by downloading a week's worth of data in advance—making it possible for you to get away with only using WiFi to speed up GPS fixes rather than having to use cellular data.

How do you get it? Although aGPS is more pervasive, HTC includes the Qualcomm designed system on some devices, and Palm put it on their Treo Pro. And hackers are adding it to yet more devices.

David Marseilles
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Prepaid Introduction

If you're looking to save some money, you might take a long look at your cellular bill. If you're a heavy user of voice and or data, contract plans might be your best bet, while simultaneously providing you with a subsidy of your phone every 2 years or so. However, some light users may find cost savings in a prepaid plan. Extremely light users could save a lot.

American carriers are only just now really offering a respectable variety of prepaid plans. In Asia and Europe, prepaid is far more popular, but in the U.S., carriers have been reluctant to offer decent service or decent prepaid phones. Why? They like the security that comes with having a subscriber base locked in to their plans. What's more, American consumers rather like the phone subsidies that come with contracts. Having to pay full price for a high-end handset can come as quite a shock to some.

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