Can you spot me?

Have you ever missed a turn on a road or almost got in a car accident because your phones GPS wasn't functioning properly? My family and myself included know this feeling all too well. This week I will be testing how accurate the location services are on each phone, and how quickly and smoothly the app updates your location while driving in a car.

I will be testing at two locations for this test. The first location will be at my house, and the second will be on campus. At my house I will test the location of all the phones in both the front and backyard. While i'm in the front yard I will be roughly 25 feet away from the Wi-fi router, and while i'm in the backyard roughly 50 feet away. I will use campus to test the driving scenario since there are long straight aways that will always allow me to be connected to the schools internet. All tests will be using Google Maps.

Here are the results of the first tests at my house. Pictured are the three phones locations of where it thought I was standing, followed by a photo of my actual location. Unfortunately, however, the quality of the photos being taken from the iPhone of both the Android and Windows phone are too bad (the map photo quality on both phones is too low to get a clear representation of where it thinks I am) so I will be labeling them on a map of my own after I see the location on each phone.

    Windows phone:                                     Actual location:
 

    iPhone:                                                   Android:

    

Windows phone:                                  Actual location:

 

iPhone:                                                 Android phone:

 


As we can see in the photos above, none of the GPS locations from the phone were able to get the exact spot I was standing in. For the backyard the iPhone was the closest, coming within one or two feet, followed by the Windows phone in a close second then the Android phone. For the front yard however, the Android phone was the most accurate followed by the iPhone and then the Windows phone. Since there are discrepancies with these results I cannot conclude what one was more accurate overall.

For the driving test I will not be able to show you visually the results like I did for the ones when I was standing still at my house. This is because it won't show how smoothly the phone updates the location.

For the test we drove along the road that is inside of my schools campus. We maintained a speed of roughly 20 MPH. As I looked at all the phones while the maps were open I could noticeably see a difference in how smooth the map moved across the screen between the three of them. The iPhone updated the location very fast and the map moved smoothly across the screen without it jumping. The next best one was the Android phone. This phone updated only slightly slower than the iPhone, but it had not as smooth of a feeling to it, since the map kept jumping across the screen. The Windows phone was most defiantly the laggiest and updated very slow compared to the other two, and the screen maps jumped a lot as it was moving.

Overall the winner would most likely have to be the iPhone. Although for the standing still test it was not a lot more accurate than the others, it did have the smoothest viewing while moving in a car, which is necessary if you are always using a GPS.