iPhone/iPad/Pre experiment, part one

With the iPad2 out this week­end, I’ve start­ed to con­sid­er an upgrade from the orig­i­nal iPad to the new­er, lighter mod­el. Mon­ey is a fac­tor, so if I were to get a new one I’d have to sell the old one, and that would still leave me short of a replacement.

I’ve start­ed to con­sid­er whether I could get away with a plain WiFi ver­sion of the iPad, which would knock $130 off the price of the mod­el I’d select. It still means shelling out more for the replace­ment than I can sell the orig­i­nal for, but that takes a sig­nif­i­cant bite out of the difference.

I don’t use the 3G ser­vice since I have WiFi avail­able almost every­where I go. I tried it for a month when I first got the iPad, then had it shut off and I haven’t missed it. The real rea­son I want­ed a 3G iPad is because the 3G chipset includes GPS. The WiFi-only ver­sion has no GPS.

One of my intend­ed uses for the iPad is trav­el nav­i­ga­tion while on the road. So the ques­tion is, will a WiFi iPad know where it is if it is con­nect­ed to a WiFi net­work? What if that WiFi net­work is run­ning off a device that has GPS?

See, I have a cell­phone that acts as a mobile WiFi hotspot. It is a fea­ture that is becom­ing com­mon these days. While the mobile hotspot fea­ture of my Palm Pre chews through my bat­tery aggres­sive­ly, it works nice­ly for brief inter­vals and at times I can plug the device in to a wall socket.

The dif­fi­cul­ty with the exper­i­ment lies in the fact that I don’t have a WiFi-only iPad. The whole point of the exper­i­ment is to see whether I might want one. A good approx­i­ma­tion for the pur­pos­es of exper­i­men­ta­tion (at least, one hopes) is the 1^st-gen­er­a­tion iPhone I dug out of the mothballs.

The objec­tive: find out whether Apple’s Google Maps app would use loca­tion infor­ma­tion gleaned from the Pre.

I used: an orig­i­nal iPhone (the one that had no GPS and did geolo­ca­tion exclu­sive­ly through cell tow­er tri­an­gu­la­tion) and my Palm Pre, which has a GPS chip and does cell tow­er tri­an­gu­la­tion. It also acts as a wifi hotspot with the 3G data con­nec­tion as its upstream data source.

What I did: I set the iPhone to “air­plane mode” but then turned WiFi on sep­a­rate­ly. The phone does­n’t have ser­vice any­more any­way, but one pre­sumes that it still talks to cell tow­ers to get the time, loca­tion, and poten­tial­ly make emer­gency phone calls. Air­plane mode turns off the cell radio entire­ly, and remains with the cell radio turned off even after WiFi is enabled. This means the iPhone should have no way to know where it is save for the sig­nal from wifi.

I turned the mobile hotspot fea­ture on my Pre on and told the iPhone to join my Pre’s WiFi net­work. Then I opened the Maps appli­ca­tion. It asked me if it was OK to use my loca­tion. I tapped yes and 

The result: it put a pin right near my house on the map.

This sug­gests that I don’t need to have a 3G iPad in order to trav­el with it, because it can get loca­tion infor­ma­tion from the phone as long as I have a phone with the mobile hotspot feature.

The flaws in my hypoth­e­sis: it’s pos­si­ble that my loca­tion was cached By the iPhone ear­li­er. It’s also pos­si­ble that the iPhone looked around at the avail­able wifi net­works’ names, sent that data out to Google (or some­where) for the geolo­ca­tion infor­ma­tion. If that is what it does, then rely­ing on a wifi iPad and a cell­phone could leave me doing all my nav­i­ga­tion on a 3‑inch screen rather than a 10-Inch one. Not the end of the world, but exper­i­ments like this make it avoidable.

The next exper­i­ment will have to be done anoth­er day. It will be: to go out on the high­way and stop some­where I have a cell­phone sig­nal but no local WiFi sig­nals. If I repeat the exper­i­ment under those con­di­tions, I should be able to deter­mine whether a non-3G iPad is suit­able for traveling.