[Galaxy S I9000 General] wogfella:
First let me start by saying that I have a habit of drunk posting. So I logged into XDA today at work and went "huh? An extra bunch of 'Thanks'? What the hell have I done now?"

Which means that while the information in the OP does a decent job of summing up what I was told, some was a little off. Cheers for pointing out where I got things wrong.

Remember, last week "my mind = blown" by the fact that GPS isn't 2-way...which makes sense but is one of those things that I never considered...

You are quite right, there are a whole bunch of sats whizzing around up there in set orbits. Some of them "talk" to ground stations to get updates about the world in general, but a bunch just go screaming past blaring out their message.

I asked my mate at work who told me about how GPS works....his response? "Yeah, Lies to Children works like that." Apparently a combination of his half-explanation and my beer meant I got something wrong there. Sorry. :)

To give the full information about the different sats flying about, and how they get send the information....well, apparently it was easier to say "geostationary" !!

Again, you're right. But in the GPS.conf file there are both NTP and A-GPS servers. I was of the understanding the NTP address information also gave ...wait, disregard - just Googled that.

NTP only gives you time. And it won't matter which NTP server you get unless you have networking issues. I suppose the answer there lies in the fact that a "closer" NTP server will get you a quicker response to begin with, so your phone can start the process of working out the offset quicker....

Good tips, though I'm too much of a beer drinker to go running. Screen in or out.

Correct...but kids these days also assume that steak literally grows on trees. Assumptions are the mother of all....

Correct, that was my point about the crappy GPS chip being like a crappy transistor radio. The combination of the quality of the chip plus the really really bad antenna (and it's position) means that people will not get car-gps like quality from their phone....and they shouldn't !!!

You're talking about the "final" output, but when I mentioned processing I meant the processing of the signal received.

I asked again about this. It was explained thusly: If you have interference in the form of tall buildings (for example) then the signal will actually bounce around a bit before being picked up. That "echo" can sometimes give a false reading if you took that one bit of information as a whole, as it's not a true representation of the time it took for the signal to get down from the sat.

So the device collects constantly and shunts that information to the processor to determine the length of time between when the sat spat it out and when the unit received it.

Now say every 10th "message" is a bounced/echo one. If the device is only able to process every 5th message, then it's potentially going to have up to half the messages be a dodgy echo job = bad location. It will catch up, eventually, but will take longer to know something weird is going on.

If, on the other hand, the more powerful processor was able to work out every 3rd message or more, then a more accurate fix comes quicker.

Dude, the more people who post (sober) the better the information we have!!! Post away and make it long! Mine was!!