iPhone: High tech safety device
November 26th, 2007 by Tim Grahl
Over the Thanksgiving holiday I went for a ride with a buddy of mine on some new local trails. We had never been on these trails before and about thirty minutes into the ride he took a pretty bad spill and snapped his ankle. You can read about the whole ordeal here.
When you’re deep into some unfamiliar singletrack and there’s an injury, it can get extremely frustrating when trying to relay your location to emergency services. And this is what I was dealing with while on my cell phone. Fortunately, I started having issues with my phone so I grabbed Mike’s iPhone and called back. Since the iPhone is GPS enabled the 911 operator immediately saw our exact location on their map and was able to relay the information to the people trying to find us. In less than 20 minutes the first two emergency crew showed up on site.
My next phone will be the iPhone or similarly equipped with GPS, and yours should be to.
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The iPhone doesn’t have true GPS but emergency personnel are able to use a triangulation of connected cell towers to find a location. This is really no different than any other non-GPS phone. The only reason it didn’t work on your phone is because the signal was poor.
Yeah Craig, I did some reading and I see that it doesn’t have GPS. What’s weird is that my phone is also on the AT&T network but they weren’t able to triangulate the signal. I had four bars of service but my phone just kept restarting after a couple minutes of being on the line with someone. However when I called back with the iPhone they were immediately able to see my location. I wonder what the difference is if both our phones had strong signals and running on the same network.
The difference is probably AGPS. I would be very curious to learn about the specifics as far as what sort of GPS data the iPhone has vs. what is calculated by the server, but this is the general technology that is incorporated (by law, I believe) into recent cell phones.
Here’s an interesting article on how this same technology is being incorporated into Google Maps mobile edition.
http://tinyurl.com/3xdu7g
How old is your phone?
another way to use an ipod/iphone as a safety device, if you’re stuck at night going home on the road without a light, turn the backlight to “always on” and it works really well as a light for cars to see you
This site needs updated badly.
i agree with the update part
If you run a Garmin you can extract your exact coordinates. That’s precision.