It works - Vodafone finally finds me!
After months of trying "find + seek" on the otherwise poorly designed Vizzavi WAP portal, finally - today - it found me! Well, almost.
Previous attempts had infuriated me by insisting that it could not locate me and I had to manually enter an address, which did not seem to work unless I entered a postal code! Come on guys - how am I going to know that off the top of my head? Talk about poor usability. They might like to read Jakob Nielsen's report on WAP usability and think again.
Anyway, today it worked. Well, it found me within 2 miles, which is not bad I guess. But that just goes to show that cell-based ID (which I'm assuming they use) is never going to be as good as GPS except in micro-cell areas (which I'm hardly in on the edge of town here). I'm still in shock from Orange's LBS project manager's claim that Three (Hutchison3G) are not really ahead of the game by staking their interest in assisted GPS for their users. Hello? Well, which would you prefer? Knowing where you are in the nearest 50 metres or the nearest 2 miles? But then that's because Orange's accuracy graph was clearly focussed on micro-cell areas. Fine if you live in the city centre.
The strange thing about the find + seek is that it gave me a precise address where it thought I was located - "6 blabla street" - which seems really odd when you first get the information on the WAP page. It almost feels like a fault. By being so precise in the address, it gives the impression that it can locate you to the nearest house, but has just got it wrong. Whereas what it is probably trying to do is give you a fixed address as a real reference point, rather than simply saying "you're in blabla street" which could be rather long.
Whilst on the topic, I just noticed that CPS announced that Texas Instruments is going to include their enhanced observed time difference (E-OTD) technology into the TI baseband chipset for GSM.
6:50:32 PM 
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