Navizon "virtual GPS" comes to iPhone

It only placed me about a mile away from my actual destination. instead of placing me in downtown st. louis - it put me north - in the mississippi river!

Interesting ideas, but many suggested what will happen if Apple start blocking native apps?
The other question : how good is their database of cell tower location, wifi and so on? I can see it working nicely in a city but what about in a less cover area, will it really work like a true GPS ? And based from some of the feedback above, the database they have seems inaccurate for various city... Nice try, but I am not sure that I will be ready to pay $25 for that application right now.

Steve
http://inewsonly.com
The first ZUI news aggregator for iPhone and iPod touch

Interesting ideas, but many suggested what will happen if Apple start blocking native apps?
The other question : how good is their database of cell tower location, wifi and so on? I can see it working nicely in a city but what about in a less cover area, will it really work like a true GPS ? And based from some of the feedback above, the database they have seems inaccurate for various city... Nice try, but I am not sure that I will be ready to pay $25 for that application right now.

Steve
http://inewsonly.com
The first ZUI news aggregator for iPhone and iPod touch

causes lots of crashes when installed on my phone. and it couldnt locate me anyway lol.

@Jonathan Allen: No, it's not just bitterness.

Navizon IS working for me, but I'm not interested in paying for something that Steve F'n Jobs says is "his job to stop."

I'll wait for the "Made for iPhone" stamp before pulling the (certainly-confident $25) trigger on this one.

Here in San Francisco, it has found me everywhere I went today. I traveled from SFO, through downtown and then out to sunset. It kept up and found me within a block or two tops.

It doesn't work. I have been travelling in Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, and Dallas and it doesn't work in any of these places. You're better off randomly choosing a location in Google maps and getting your position right moreso than this application doing it.

I actually wrote a pretty detailed article on how one would go about doing this on the iPhone last week...

http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=24

I haven't had the time to do this, but an open source version would be nice. geohot says he wanted to work on something similar too.

All semi-current phones have cell tower triangulation capabilities. The Java Midlet API has a function that lets you easily get longitude or latitude via the most accurate available way (GPS if the phone has it, or else triangulation). Triangulation is very inaccurate, which is why it's not that well known. I'm not sure about this whole wifi thing.

it's crap!