[Galaxy S II Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] alsheron:
Note: I do not have my phone anymore - 02 staff opened another new phone while I was there returning mine and found same issue. See later posts for details.

HOWEVER: I think, as mentioned later on in this thread very usefully - that we really need to have some requirements for testing, some Metrics, othewise this will (continue) to become a competition of will, emotion and opinion rather than the facts we need.

This thread is proving useful to quite a few people in deciding what to expect from the SGSII and their GPS requirements from it. Let's keep the feedback coming in.

PLEASE INCLUDE IN ANY FEEDBACK THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION:

TtFF (time to first fix - although not the primary interest in this particualr thread - interesting anyhow): cold/hot, stationary/moving, indoors/in car/in pocket/urban area/open field.

Accuracy: after 10/30/60 seconds (in all the above situations), as given by the phone and as measured vs a known landmark

Number of sats and SNR: after 30 seconds take 3 snapshots in 5 second intervals

Wifi on/off, "use wireless networks" on/off, and if the S2 has the "use sensor aiding" setting whether that's on/off.

Lastly, firmware release could be helpful.

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ORIGINAL POST:

Ok - just got my second Galaxy S II and am loving the speed and the update from my original SGS.

I had such severe problems with the GPS in my original SGS that it was virtually unuseable. With the SGSII I hoped that would be fixed as I use Google Navigation a lot.

Now I find that there are very similar issues with the Galaxy S II as there were with the original Galaxy S.

Specifically the SGSII has improvements in that it finds satellites (I usually get a lock on 6-8 of a maximum of 12) but that the accuracy never goes better than 26-45 meters and fluctuates which makes matters worse. Something is not quite right with the way the SGSII uses it's locks on GPS sattelites as it doesn't translate to the accuracy it should.

I've stood outside and compared side by side the SGSII and an (old now) HTC Hero and the number of satellites locked are similar and the time to lock is similar - but significantly the HTC Hero gains a high accuracy of 12-3 metres and most importantly it keeps this accuracy stable. The SGSII on the other hand fluctuates with a similar number of satellite locks and sometimes the accuracy goes down to 60-70 meters briefly.

Quite honestly - I'm shocked that Samsung who have such huge R&D budgets and masses of experience in the handset market could not have nailed this problem from the original SGS being so bad. I almost can't believe that they could have repeated the same issue twice. Granted the SGSII is *better* - significaantly so compared to my original Galaxy S - but then that doesn't mean it's good or acceptable given how extremely bad the accuracy was on my SGS.

I'm taking my handset back to O2 tomorrrow to see if they can swap it out for another one. Hopefully slight variances in manufacturing will come into play and the replacement will be better. This is simply not good enough from Samsung and I really wish they would get their act together.

Also - just want to say: Please please please can people understand the difference between GPS fix time and GPS accuracy. It's getting to be a problem when people declare their GPS fully working when their GPS fix times become quick - totally ignoring fix accuracy and it happened a LOT with the SGS. GPS accuracy is completely different to GPS fix time although of course GPS fix time is better if it's quick. I'd rather have accuracy over fix time anyway because what's the point of a quick but inaccurate and "wobbly" GPS fix? Certainly no good for Google Navigation.

Engadget have posted a video declaring that the GPS in the SGSII "really works". Well - the map was zoomed out quite a way and they also turned off Wireless which was known to help the original SGS get better accuracy because it was believed that wireless was somehow interfering with the GPS functionality to some extent. So: Engadget did not zoom in far enough. They did not show the accuracy. They turned off wifi. Therefore they cannot claim it's "fixed"

What are other people's experiences: Can we get some posts here showing *ACCURACY* and how stable it is - NOT fix time? GPS test in the market is a good tool to do this. Google Maps is good enough.

Can we also get some feedback here about Google Navigation performance. Is there any drift. Does the lock stay stable?