Alex Ethridge

I know that some phones have some sort of location sensing built in and that the approximate location of the phones can be located via a web site. I also know one must subscribe to this service for the phone in question. I don't know if this is by pinging off the towers or by satellite. The phone I'm interested in at this moment is a Blackberry on a Sprint service.

Does it work from satellites or from tower signals?

Also, are there any Palm Treo phones that have this feature? I am most interested in knowing if the Centro has this capability and how accurate it is.

Greek

Centro with latest version of GoogleMaps, can track you (using the cell towers) with a 1 km precision or less (much less in downtown with much more towers).

I tried it in a GSM network, but I guess that it should work in Sprint.

Regards,

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Alex Ethridge

I have seen a real-time demonstration of a moving Blackberry on Sprint over a period of several days and the accuracy ranges from about 5 yards to about 875 yards. I was hoping for something that would be consistent at about 5 yards or less.

My suspicion is that the accuracy of tracking by cell towers is going to vary too widely.

dmitrygr

if it didn't, nobody would need gps

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Alex Ethridge

I am familiar with GPS tracking on vehicles. My son has a service business with eight service vans. He can tell where every one of his service vans are within a couple of yards at any point in time from any computer that has internet access. It actually displays the exact street address the where the vans are. He can even tell how fast each one is traveling at any point in time and receives an immediate alert by cell phone when one travels outside the service area or exceeds a certain user-defined speed.

This service costs about a thousand dollars to install on each van and $35 per month to track them.

So, I know such capability exists.

So then, is there not a phone that can be tracked by GPS?

ejtbatchelor

In order for a cell phone to be tracked by GPS it must be GPS enabled (it has a GPS transceiver) you are talking about two different technologies a regular cellphone can only be tracked by cell towers not satellites because it has no way to communicate with a satellite directly, and yes tracking by cell towers will vary widely, with GPS this can happen as well but much less likely.

Alex Ethridge

I understand the difference between tracking by cell tower and by GPS. Back to the question:

Is there not a phone that can be tracked by GPS?

If "Yes", where do I find it?

ejtbatchelor

Yes just get a phone that has a GPS transceiver in it.

JavaJiveJump

I read that Sprint and Verizon have phones with true GPS.
Also:

http://www.intomobile.com/2008/04/2...ps-support.html

Might be interesting for iPhone users

Aces

Am I missing something here? What I think Alex is asking is if there is a way to track where a specific cell phone is from elsewhere. It seems that all the responses are on how you can see where you are when you have the phone in hand. If that's what he wants to do, there'd be only two ways to do it. 1) the cell carrier would have to allow for and offer it as a service. or 2) there would have to be software on the phone to take what it knows about it's location, then send that information, probably w/o being detected, to another cell phone or as an email. the first is sometimes done, in order to help with public safety, in specific situations. The other would probably involve a company modifying phones specifically for this type of market. I don't think you'll find anything directly available though.

Alex Ethridge

Spot on. A typical scenario would be parents wanting to know where their teenagers (phones) are at any given time.

In other words, in the situation of the missing girl in Florida right now, the mother would have known she wasn't at a friends house spending the night. She would have been able to detect in an instant she was actually several states away. That may have saved the girl's life (who is now probably dead).

But, we want to be able to get it down to very few yards--maybe ten or fifteen yards or less.

ejtbatchelor

Alex Ethridge

We've tried NexTel. Sometimes their tracking is within a one-mile circle. That isn't accurate enough.

ejtbatchelor

Unfortunately unless you are using military gps that is something you would have to accept. Or you could try a combination of cell tower tracking and gps tracking although this will probably not provide the accuracy you are looking for.