Palm’s Centro contains a very useful feature called My Location. It allows Google Maps to access cell tower data, which can be used to generate a more-or-less accurate position in a fashion similar to a true GPS (the S60 version of Maps supports external GPS systems for quite some time).
The boys at Google’s claim to have improved the accuracy if this feature quite a bit in the last hours. Looking at the picture below, we can see that the “your position” circle is now a lot smaller, as the database is more accurate:
Rural areas now get better positioning and more accurate “circles”:
Zhengrong Ji, a software engineer employed at Google’s, concludes as following:
So how exactly have we made these improvements? Mobile operators typically need a lot more cell towers in populous areas to service all the users. This means each individual tower provides a much smaller coverage footprint. On the other hand, in a very sparsely populated area, towers provide much larger coverage footprints. We’ve developed algorithms to try and figure out what the right circle size should be and are pleased to make this available to you today.
There’s actually nothing you need to do to start enjoying the new improvements to My Location. Any application powered by Google’s geolocation service automatically benefits from today’s launch. Enjoy!
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