[Touch Diamond, MDA Compact IV General] RH Photography:
Help! My Diamond GPS reception is MUCH worse than on my Touch Cruise

Hi,

I've just got a Touch Diamond, and the GPS reception is absolutely appalling. I have hard-reset twice, after which I've done nothing except download a QuickGPS update, but still the signal strength and its ability to connect to satellites is completely inconsistent and unreliable, even outdoors. I CAN get a good signal occasionally, but it's very rare. Most often I get no GPS signals whatsoever, or else I get just a couple of weak greyed-out signal bars in TomTom.

I can lay my Diamond down next to my Touch Cruise (both have identical TomTom 6 software loaded from the same CAB), and the Cruise always launches the app faster, finds the GPS device faster, AND finds adequate satellites faster. The Touch Cruise has a lot of problems, but the one thing it has always been very good at is GPS, and it has NEVER failed to find adequate satellites in TomTom 6, even indoors. It always takes well under a minute to do so, too. It's surely not unreasonable to expect at least the same level of performance from the next generation of device. Why should the Diamond's GPS performance be demonstrably so much worse?!!

Nine times out of ten, my Touch Diamond will simply sit there for an hour or more with the TomTom status bar reading 'Waiting for valid GPS signal...". Quite often when I open the GPS configuration option in TT6, it shows absolutely NO SHRED of a GPS signal whatsoever, even outdoors. (My Diamond and my Cruise have identical GPS settings in both Windows and TomTom, by the way).

The annoying thing is that the Diamond's GPS HAS worked on a couple of rare occasions, and the signal strength has been at least as good as on my Touch Cruise. The Diamond is much worse at holding the signal however, and is totally and utterly unreliable for navigation. It certainly isn't the 'Ultra-sensitive GPS' that HTC's marketing promised - it's nowhere near as good as the GPS on the Cruise, which is the previous generation! The Diamond's GPS DOES work well on very rare occasions - it's just that 95 times out of 100, I'm not getting anything at all. This makes me wonder if it isn't a WM 6.1 compatibility problem or a conflict of some kind. It's almost as if Windows is having difficulty activating/waking the GPS fully. When (and if) it finally gets going, reception is actually very good.

I have also downloaded the HTC GPS Tool as someone here suggested, and it reveals the same results as TomTom - I usually get either no satellites at all, or I get two or three red satellite status bars and a message saying 'Fix not available'. It ALWAYS shows a data stream coming from COM4 though, so there doesn't seem to be any problem actually finding the GPS device. On the rare occasions when I have got a usable GPS signal, the HTC Tool then shows two or three red status bars and three or four green ones as well. During those rare periods, Google Maps can also find anything from three to ten satellites, even indoors. However, the next few times I try the Diamond's GPS, nothing will happen at all - it's suddenly as if all the satellites have fallen out of the sky.

By the way, would QuickGPS make ANY difference on the Diamond? As other have pointed out, aGPS is disabled on the Diamond by default. Aren't QuickGPS and aGPS the same thing? I don't know. But if so, surely the QuickGPS data is useless on the Diamond?

Does anyone have ANY idea how to make GPS on the Diamond work as well as it does on the Touch Cruise? Does anyone know why it doesn't already? Has anyone else done a direct comparison between the Diamond and another HTC device using the same GPS software?

I really like the Diamond, but it's incredibly frustrating that the GPS is unreliable to the point of being unusable. At the moment, I'm having to carry the Cruise for GPS navigation and the Diamond for everything else! Certainly not what I paid for. It should do this stuff straight out of the box. Since it doesn't, I can only assume my device is faulty so if I can't get it fixed by the weekend, I'm returning it for a replacement.

Thanks,

Rob.

P.S. Sorry for such a long post, but I needed to vent.