iPhone/iPad/Pre experiment, part two

I’ll give away a hint at the results of my exper­i­ments by say­ing this: round two end­ed up being the final round of test­ing, and the the­o­ret­i­cal win­ner in the con­test of iPad2 WiFi ver­sus first-gen­er­a­tion iPad with 3G and WiFi is: the first-gen­er­a­tion iPad.

More details about my con­straints and deci­sion cri­te­ria can be found in part one, but the basic run­down is: I want to know whether an iOS device with­out 3G or GPS could serve as a nav­i­ga­tion device for trav­el­ing if teth­ered to a device act­ing as a mobile hotspot.

Yes­ter­day’s test results were slight­ly promis­ing but incon­clu­sive, large­ly because I did­n’t actu­al­ly leave home to per­form the exper­i­ments. Today’s exper­i­ments were to test maps on an orig­i­nal mod­el iPhone in «air­plane mode» (mean­ing with the cel­lu­lar radio turned off) but WiFi enabled and my Palm Pre act­ing as a WiFi hotspot. The dif­fer­ence today is that I would test in a place with­out any near­by WiFi networks.

Read­ers in rur­al areas may not be able to appre­ci­ate that this was a non-triv­ial assign­ment. Almost any­where one goes in San Fran­cis­co there is a WiFi sig­nal to be found that could iden­ti­fy the loca­tion of the map­ping device. The first idea about where to find one was to go up Twin Peaks which is removed from res­i­den­tial and com­mer­cial areas both by dis­tance and alti­tude. I rode up in the fog (see the pic­ture to the right for a view of San Fran­cis­co’s sky­line) and checked the iPhone for WiFi sig­nals. For a few sec­onds I thought I had it, but then one sig­nal blinked into appear­ance. It was weak, but in the absence of lead shield­ing, a new spot would have to be scouted.

The next best oppor­tu­ni­ty was to leave San Fran­cis­co in search of less-devel­oped land. There one could find a spot far enough away from any house or busi­ness that the absence of a near­by WiFi sig­nal would be like­ly. It took a ride down to the junc­tion of Routes 35 and 92 to find such a place. There I pulled the motor­cy­cle off the road far enough that I thought it like­ly I’d be safe there even in the dark and fog, and pro­ceed­ed to fid­dle with gadgets.

It took only one test to tell me whether a 3G mod­el of iPad would be nec­es­sary for nav­i­ga­tion. After search­ing for WiFi net­works, the Pre’s mobile hotspot was enabled. The spot I’d picked had a strong cell con­nec­tion but there were no near­by net­works found. After open­ing the iPhone’s Maps appli­ca­tion and tap­ping the icon to find my cur­rent loca­tion, instead of ask­ing if I would allow the appli­ca­tion to see my loca­tion, I got the mes­sage: Your loca­tion could not be determined.

That means that no mat­ter how much geolo­ca­tion infor­ma­tion the phone has, none of it is actu­al­ly avail­able to the device con­nect­ed to it by WiFi. It’s a good assump­tion that this would be true also with any oth­er iOS device con­nect­ed to a mobile hotspot.

The iPad (remem­ber that this is the first gen­er­a­tion iPad with a 3G cel­lu­lar radio and GPS chipset) despite not hav­ing a data plan, teth­ered to the Pre and pulled up a map based on the loca­tion it got from GPS data. Just like that.

If I were to trav­el, I might pur­chase a data pack­age for the iPad for the dura­tion of the trip, even though I have the Pre and its mobile hotspot. It might be a good idea for two rea­sons: con­ve­nience and redun­dan­cy. The iPad would be on AT&T’s net­work and the Pre is on Ver­i­zon’s. Grant­ed that there are many places in Amer­i­ca I’d like to go that will have no sig­nal on either network—for that offline maps that do not require a con­nec­tion would be a good idea to have on hand—but hav­ing the choice of two cell net­works would def­i­nite­ly improve the chances of being able to con­nect at any giv­en time.

Of course your own mileage may vary. My choice is between an expen­sive device I have in hand ver­sus an expen­sive device I don’t yet have. Since I’ve paid the pre­mi­um for the GPS in my iPad, my deci­sion for now is to pass on the iPad2 and love the device I’m with.