[Captivate Android Development] deisama:
Alright I did the "feeling Daring" combo and all I can say is:

WOW!

Last night I had to go someplace I hadn't been before and at first the gps locked ok, but it kept telling me I'd switched streets or would disconnect alot.

But even worse, is on the way back it wouldn't connect at all! In the settings it would have like 5-8 satellite bars and it still wouldn't lock on! I kept screaming at it and was almost tempted to chuck it out the window! When it finally did connect, it would be so laggy that it would tell me to turn at streets I'd already passed.

I mean really at that point its not just useless, its dangerous.

So, tonight I applied the fix, and decided to try it out. At first it seemed to take a little longer to lock on than I was hoping for, and that was kind of disapointing. (Was hoping for the "in home" lock). But I took it outside and once it got a lock everything was great!

Good signs:

The GPS actually connected to more than 5 satellites. Connected to 9 at one point!

Was able to stay connected even with weaker signals. (The GPS app I used CoPilot has this white line through the bars and before if the satelites dropped under it it would lose its location and never get it back, but now it stays connected)

So, with all that I was feeling lucky, so I got in the car, and told the gps to go the same place I went to last night. This time the GPS locked immediately, and during the drive it always knew where I was and never told me I was on the wrong road! The only time it disconnected was when I went through a tunnel, but was able to immediately connect again after I got out.

I got there without a single glitch, and so after that I was feeling quite brave. Since last time it couldn't get a signal at all, and it would be cheating to just use the fix I already had, I turned off the phone, waited about 10 seconds than started it back up.

Since it was a cold boot, I was expecting a rather long delay to get a signal fix, but much to my surprise it locked in immediately, and I was able to get back home without any issues!

Quite a change from last night!

Also, before I had the Touch Pro 2, and before that the Fuze, so I come from a long line of ****ty GPS's. Maybe its just the low expectations, but I had no idea GPS's were supposed to work like this!

Now I can start the program up, and it locks in within 20 seconds. Its like I can wonder where I am, and the GPS will actually tell me! No long akward pauses where I wonder if it'll ever turn on. No driving around lost while I wait for the damn thing to pick up the position. Now I actually feel safe turning the program off when I don't need it, where as before I would often leave the phone in my car with the gps on, so that when I was ready to go it would still be locked!

And having the GPS know precisely where I am is amazing! Like before if there were two turns really close together (think downtown streets), I pretty much just assumed I'd be missing one of them, because it took so long for it to figure out that I had turned that by the time it did, I'd already driven past the next street I was turning at! Now its all like "turn here" and after I make the turn its all "ok, now turn here" and I do and than it doesn't have to recalculate its route or anything!

It's like Magic!

So far the only issues I had are:

The libext2 files that come with the gps fix are clearly inferior to the SRE ones. Took a bit longer to "scan for media files". When I got home I put the SRE ones back on the device. It was still able to get a gps lock, but I didn't really test it out with another drive. Hopefully that works out ok.

CoPilot sucks compared to iGuidance for Windows Mobile. All kinds of things I took for granted, like hearing the street names, being able to understand what its saying, or even being able to see ahead of time the name of where my next turn will be.

Anyone have any recommendations for a better one?

Thanks again for making my phone not suck. I don't know how I'd be able to handle ATT phones if it wasn't xda-developers!