Root GPS Fix?

[Zoandroid]

The GPS on my A500 tablet is extremely sluggish and wont lock in the same physical locations where my Droid X locks its GPS quickly. Anyone know of a fix for this? Rooted stock 3.2.

 

[al2fast]

haven't tried it myself but there is a fix on xda developers site: AGPS Patch Iconia 3.1 & 2.2 | GET BACK TO RAPID GPS LOCK, CAN LOCK ONTO MORE SATS - xda-developers

 

[Zoandroid]

Thanks! That fellow built his work upon another XDA member, whose post I found this morning. If you read into either of their threads you will find mention of trying to flash the zip file provided from recovery mode sometimes not working, which is what happened to me when I tried it. But the alternative is then to extract the gps config file manually. I did that, backed up the OEM version (I am rooted, running 3.2 stock ROM) and then overwrote it with the extracted copy.

I was prepared to say "yes, it helped, but not that much" until your post here led me to read this newer thread.

In that, he mentions that with the A500 tablet (and perhaps others) the GPS performance is way better if you stand it up instead of allowing it to lie flat (as I had been doing). So I stood mine up, and he is very much right! I got a lock in less than 20 seconds on 3 sats the first time I tried it.

Before standing it up, I was only getting an error accuracy of 656 feet, which is certainly nothing to write home about. Standing it up, I get an error accuracy of only 32 feet. Not too shabby! It doesn't need to stand completely vertical, either. I have a leather case which has the same features as the stock case that comes with the A500, as far as how it stands. So one can either go vertical, or on a shallow angle, depending how you stand the case. Even at the shallow angle, it locks quickly. But if I lay it back down, it will eventually lose the lock. Lift it back up some, and it locks in again. The second time I lifted it I got 4 sats to lock. When I laid it back flat they lost the lock.

Odd that the GPS hardware in this tablet can't work lying flat, especially since it is a 'tablet' after all. But the bottom line for me is that it definitely did help to use his gps config file! Before that I could never get it to see any sats at all, and although I admittedly did not know about standing it up at that point in time, I had been using it in both flat and propped up positions when I had tried testing the GPS. I have used the freeware GPS Status and Tools on 2 previous Android phones, so I have it on the tablet too. In the past I found when one of the phones didn't want to lock, running GPS Status first, and allowing it to lock, would then allow it to lock quickly in Navigation mode when I was driving.