The Eye-Fi promises simple connectivity for digital cameras, but does it really work?

One reason the smartphones like the iPhone are gaining ground on purpose-built cameras is their instant connectivity: Take a photo and you can immediately share it on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, or other popular sites. Wouldn’t it be great if your SLR or digital camera could do the same? This is the promise of the Eye-Fi card: It adds Wi-Fi connectivity to most popular cameras, enabling you to transfer photos directly to your laptop or the Internet. If only it worked.

Introducing the Eye-Fi

The Eye-Fi card is a marvel of engineering. Now in its second iteration (X2), the Eye-Fi is a standard SD card with a built-in Wi-Fi radio and smarts to handle connecting and transferring images. It’s really amazing to think that that tiny card has a whole computer with Wi-Fi inside it!

Check out my follow-on post to see just what lurks inside the Eye-Fi X2!

But the Eye-Fi is more than a card. It’s also an online service (Eye-Fi View), software application for Windows or Mac (Eye-Fi Center), and app for iOS or Android that enables photo sharing. The card is useless without these applications and services.

The Eye-Fi card is compatible with most cameras that take SD media, and many (including my Sony NEX-5) have special support for the card. My NEX includes an on-screen icon showing card status, and will keep the camera powered on while images are being transferred.

The X2 Generation

Last year, Eye-Fi upgraded the hardware in their Eye-Fi lineup. These new X2 cards are a huge upgrade, as you will soon see, and were enough to finally push me off the fence and buy one. I purchased a Connect X2 card at Wal Mart, which sells them for a reasonable $39, as does Amazon.

Earlier Eye-Fi cards required a known Wi-Fi network to do anything at all, limiting their usefulness. But the new X2 series (including the Connect X2 I purchased) has a “Direct Mode” capability, allowing the card to act as a limited hotspot to transfer photos to a laptop, tablet, or phone when no network is in range.

Eye-Fi Features and Services

All Eye-Fi X2 cards offer the same features and services – for a price. Even my lowly Connect X2 can be upgraded to match the Pro X2′s geotagging and public Wi-Fi support. The only really Pro-exclusive feature is RAW file transfer. But none of these added features is actually worth that much, as you will see. I recommend the base Connect X2.

Eye-Fi inexplicably leaves the Geo X2 off their comparison table. And they’re not exactly generous with the information. So here’s my own Eye-Fi comparison table, and I’ve included about the nicest regular SD card I could find.

	Patriot 32 GB SDHC	Eye-Fi Connect X2	Eye-Fi Geo X2	Eye-Fi Mobile X2	Eye-Fi Pro X2
Speed	Class 10 (10 MB/s)	Class 6 (6 MB/s)
Connectivity	SD Reader	SD Reader, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi with Direct Mode
Capacity	32 GB	4 GB		8 GB
RAW compatibility	Manual import only				Yes
Sharing	Manual	Automatic to Flickr, Facebook, etc
Geotagging	No	$29.99 option	Yes	$29.99 option	Yes
Hotspot Access	No	$29.99 per year			First year free, then $29.99 per year
List Price	$84.99	$49.99	$69.95	$79.99	$106.99
Street Price	$50	$40	$70	$72	$90
Price With Geo	N/A	$70	$70	$102	$90

Direct Mode

This is the real killer feature of the Eye-Fi X2 line. When the card isn’t in range of a known Wi-Fi hotspot (and has photos to transfer) it will create its own ad-hoc network for local devices. Once connected to this network, laptops, tablets, and phones can transfer photos at Wi-Fi speed directly from the card.

I’ll write more about it in a follow-on post, but suffice to say that Direct Mode is the only feature worth paying for and it’s included free on all Eye-Fi X2 cards!

Geotagging

Geotagging seems like an awesome add-on for a digital camera, and it is surprising more don’t already include it. Sites like Flickr and applications like iPhoto make great use of location tagging, and the iPhone automatically tags all photos.

But the Eye-Fi has two major strikes against it when it comes to geotagging, and these combine to reduce the value of this feature:

1. The Eye-Fi cards don’t have a GPS receiver, so they have to triangulate location based on nearby Wi-Fi access points. This gives innacurate location data at the best of times and is completely worthless off the beaten path.
2. The Eye-Fi doesn’t tag photos when they are taken but rather when they are transferred by the Eye-Fi software. This means that any images imported directly off the card won’t have geotags.

The limited functionality of Eye-Fi geotagging means it’s simply not worth paying extra for. There goes the $69 Geo X2 from Apple, as well as the $29 upgrade for Connect X2 users.

Hotspot Support

Basic Eye-Fi models only recognize hotspots you program them for, but the top model can access a wide range of public hotspots automatically. This is also available as an extra-charge item, priced at $29.99 per year.

Hotspot access was very valuable in earlier Eye-Fi models, since there was no way to transfer photos without them. But the X2 cards, with their Direct Mode, offer a better alternative at no cost. It’s definitely not worth buying a Pro X2 card for hotspot access, since it only includes one year of service.

SDHC Class 6 and Wireless-N Speed

The Eye-Fi X2 features two performance and compatibility improvements over previous models:

1. SDHC Class 6 compatibility means the card can now keep up with today’s fast shooting and megapixel-heavy cameras. This is more important for HD video, but some cameras (like my NEX) can tax Class 4 (40 MB/s) cards in speed shooting modes, and Class 6 (6 MB/s) might not even be enough. In fact, I did encounter some “cannot write” errors when using the Eye-Fi card, and I attribute this to the card still not being fast enough!
2. The new X2 cards support Wi-Fi “N” networks. This is more about compatibility than performance, since the card can’t transfer fast enough to tax a “G” network anyway. But folks like me who have “N-only” networks at home appreciate it, however.

Neiter of these features are deal-breakers, and neither adds much to the Eye-Fi experience. But both are welcome updates and keep the cards from becoming obsolete in today’s world.

Which Eye-Fi Card Is Best?

Normally, I have to waffle a bit when recommending a purchase. After all, some people might need to drive a Ferrari, right? But the Eye-Fi is a special case, and a single answer will do:

If you decide to buy an Eye-Fi card, get the cheapest Connect X2 model and don’t bother with any upgrades.

Seriously. The added features in the upscale Eye-Fi cards are worthless in real-world usage. Don’t buy them.

1. Stepping up to 8 GB of capacity isn’t all that valuable in a connected card, and this is some seriously expensive capacity
2. Eye-Fi geotagging is just about worthless, so put it out of your mind and don’t be tempted
3. Public hotspot usage will just be frustrating, and Direct Mode allows the card to function without it

In my next post, I will discuss my real-world experience with the Eye-Fi card, and end with a disappointing recommendation.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Introducing the Eye-Fi X2 Card
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

IT needs application monitoring: Gauges alone won't get you to your destination!

Remember what it was like to drive without a GPS? Sure, it’s possible, but a good GPS takes it to a whole new level. Need gas? A Denny’s Grand Slam? A detour around traffic? You’ve got it! And when the kids start asking “how much longer” you have a precise answer!

Old-school server metrics are like the gauges in your car: They show what’s happening now and can be useful to the driver, but a lot of questions are left un-answered. This is where application performance monitoring comes in: Rather than just checking server stats, APM gives credible, actionable, and user-focused answers about the state of your systems.

System Versus Application Metrics

The metrics collected make up the key differentiator between system performance monitoring and application performance monitoring. Every systems administrator has his own bag of tricks. My own UNIX background leads me to rely on the old-school command line utilities like sar and iostat, but more-advanced applications abound.

Most modern operating systems include a suite of tools for real-time and historical system performance statistics monitoring. Solaris leads the way with the amazing level of detail available from dtrace, but every system offers the basics: CPU load, memory usage, I/O stats, etc. Server monitoring generally focuses on single running operating systems, and the statistics generated usually focus only on a single server or virtual machine.

Data is widely available, but the issue for most systems administrators is what to do with all of it. Does it matter if a server’s CPU is pegged right now? How will that impact application performance and user experience?

Today’s applications are made up of multiple processes on multiple servers. Imagine a web application: It uses a number of web servers, a load balancer, a database, and potentially many other application components spread across dozens or machines or more. System performance metrics can suggest performance problems, but only an application-aware monitor will tell you how user experience is impacted.

The Impact of APM

Once APM is installed, IT starts looking at things differently. They will begin by logging in and checking latency and responsiveness but will be enticed to dig deeper, measuring each step in a transaction or how long it takes to process different kinds of requests.

Large businesses already have sophisticated things like this – they actively measure the performance of mission-critical applications. Quest, HP, CA, and others are raking in profits from APM products today. BMC and Microsoft are also present in this space, as are many newcomers. Each of these vendors is working their own angle, trying to come up with a special useful approach for application managers.

But APM isn’t easy, especially for smaller businesses. These applications cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase, but buying the software is just the start. Actually implementing it takes serious time and development effort, often eclipsing the acquisition cost. And most enterprise-scale APM implementations are highly customized.

Stephen’s Stance

APM can apparently protect your network from Cylons!

This level of expense and effort locks out small and midsize businesses and less mission-critical applications. They just can’t justify the investment! Now infrastructure-focused companies are getting into the market. These offerings are more useful out of the box with less configuration and customization and are targeted at smaller shops.

I recently got a look at just such a product, as SolarWinds presented at Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 4. The company is already something of a darling among techies, especially at small-to-medium shops, thanks to their range of free tools and “Thwack” discussion forum. SolarWinds was founded by sysadmins after all, and they take high-end, high-touch, tricky software like network monitoring and bring it to the masses at low cost.

Their new APM product will be released soon, but I got a peak at it during their presentation. It includes pre-configured, canned reports, making it more install-and-go than other APM products. It’s not really competitive with the big boys’ offerings, but brings APM capabilities to the rest of us. Although pricing isn’t available yet, I expect it’ll range from the low-thousand-dollar mark.

SolarWinds offered the Field Day delegates a chance to try out a beta of APM, but I’m not really in a position to give it a fair evaluation. So I asked if I could give my readers the opportunity to try out APM before it’s released. SolarWinds will give you access to the product, support, and a flip camera to record your thoughts and feedback. They’ll presumably use this for marketing and product development purposes. If you’re interested, please mail geek…@solarwinds.com and tell them Stephen Foskett referred you. And please leave me a comment and let me know what you think of the product!

Disclosure: Although this is not a paid or quid pro quo post, SolarWinds sponsored Tech Field Day, which I organize and manage.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | What is Application Performance Monitoring?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Not all advertised items are really that special!

I’m a crazy gadget freak. My prime consideration when buying gifts is electricity: If it buzzes, lights up, or moves I’m all over it!

Holiday shopping in the USA traditionally kicks off with “Black Friday”, the day after Thanksgiving. Although not quite the bonanza it’s rumored to be, many retailers do offer compelling Black Friday deals. Here are my favorites for 2010:

• The Amazon Kindle is the best holiday gift this year in my opinion. It’s fairly affordable (as electronics go) and desirable to a wide range of adults, both male and female. Seriously, I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t want one!
  • I bet Amazon’s Black Friday sale will see a reduction from the already-reasonable $139!
  • Or Best Buy will have the Nook for $99 on Thursday if you’re looking in that direction.
  • Don’t buy the cheesy Pandigital e-readers. They’re more expensive than a Nook or Kindle and, well, terrible.
• Want a tablet? Even after almost a year, Apple’s tablet is the hands-down best, and the iPad is the most-desirable electronic gift for adults (according to Retrevo) and number 3 for kids (according to Duracell).
  • Hit all the TJ Maxx and Marshalls stores in your area looking for a $399 iPad.
  • Best Buy is offering $50 off the Verizon Galaxy Tab, but it’s still no match for the mighty iPad.
  • Staples’ $399 ViewSonic Android tablet isn’t even marked down but it’s fairly cool anyway. It’s not yet available on Amazon, but Staples claims to have it in stock.
  • Skip the Augen 7″ Android tablet at Kmart, even at $139. The reviews are, how shall we put it, “unfavorable“. Same goes for the Sylvania tablet at Toys R Us. In fact, don’t buy any of the multitude of off-brand Android tablets you’ll find for under $200 – they’re all junk! This makes Sears’ offer of a Velocity Micro tablet amusing at $250!
• Want an iPod Touch?
  • Apparently, the “iTouch” is the number-2 most-requested gift for kids, with 13% asking for one this Christmas! The iPhone 4 is number one…
  • Best Buy is offering the 8 GB iPod Touch with a $30 gift card, but Toys R Us beats them with a $50 gift card on every iPod Touch! Radio Shack’s $20 offer pales in comparison, though their $15 offer on the iPod Shuffle isn’t bad.

• Need portable storage?
  • Best Buy has a 1 TB Western Digital My Passport Essential SE portable hard drive for $89. That’s $60 off MSRP and $40 less than Amazon.
  • Or you can pick up a 1 TB Seagate FreeAgent Go portable hard drive for just $89 at Staples. It’s not a GoFlex, but that’s still really cheap.
  • Walmart (ugh) will have a Western Digital My Passport Essential 500 GB Portable Hard Drive for just $39, too. That’s $30 less than Amazon’s regular price.
• Cheap Macintosh computers are hard to come by.
  • Best Buy is offering a $125 gift card with the 13″ MacBook Pro or iMac. That’s $40 less than Amazon’s price for the MacBook Pro and $85 less for the iMac!
  • Neither can’t match MicroCenter’s $200 instant deals, but at least Best Buy is available nationwide.
• Best Buy will also have $50 iTunes gift cards for $40 – buy a pile!
• Need a PC laptop? Read What To Look For In A Laptop (Holiday 2010 Edition) first!
  • Best Buy has a nicely-equipped 15″ HP Core i3 laptop for $499.
  • Staples also have a solid HP 17″ laptop with a Core i3 CPU at $499 after rebate.
  • I can’t recommend any of the junky laptops Walmart and others has on sale.
• Looking for an awesome printer? B&H Photo has the cool HP ENVY 100 on sale for $189! Otherwise, the killer HP Photosmart eStation C510a with the Zeen tablet is $360 at Amazon.
• I’m going to order a discounted copy of Office 2011 for Mac OS X from Amazon.com: Home & Student is just $79 for a single license or $109 for a 3-pack! Note that neither includes Outlook if that’s what you’re after. That’s Office for Mac Home and Business 2011, and it’s $182 for a 1-pack.
• How about a camera!
  • Though not a special discount, the $550 Sony NEX-3 Camera at Amazon remains a killer deal.
  • It’s outdated, but the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is really unbeatable for $399!
• Toys R Us has some Lego sets at 30% off: My favorite is the 6754 Family Home. I’d also grab the $10 Lego alarm clock or $65 Star Wars biofeedback Force Trainer ’cause it’s freaky.
• Finally, head to JC Penney and get a home popcorn cart for $99 after rebate!

What Not To Buy

Some things aren’t worth what you think they are. Do not buy these, even as gifts.

• E-book readers and tablets are “ecosystem devices”. Why even consider an off-brand device that lacks books or apps? And considering the aggressive pricing from Apple and Amazon, you’re not really saving much money.
• Do not buy charging mats. They require special add-ons to electronic devices. Although the Duracell and Powermat devices are being widely-pushed, geeks don’t want them!
• Do not buy off-brand GPS devices, either. You’ll wish you opted for a Garmin nüvi 1300 or Magellan RoadMate 1470.
• Same goes for still and video cameras – get a Canon, Sony, Nikon, or Flip.

I’ll be updating this post as I spot more interesting deals. Happy consumer-ing!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends $11 my way! But many of these links just go to other stores or the products themselves. I’m not trying to get rich with this list, I just picked the things I like and Amazon happens to have the best prices more often than not!

Image credit: “Look K-mart…” by Cosmic Kitty

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | The Best Black Friday Deals For Nerds Like Me (2010 Edition)
This post was categorized as Apple, Deals, Everything, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

IT infrastructure is following consumer technology out of the data center glass house and into the wide world

Dave Hitz over at NetApp poses a very interesting question: What is the ten-year trend in information technology that we are currently building to? He supplies these historical examples:

• 1982-1992: A computer on every (business) desk
• 1990s: Networking all those computers

He then goes on to suggest three ten-year trends that we might currently be living through:

1. Cloud/Outsourced Computing
2. Server Virtualization
3. Flash Memory

Although I agree on the importance of these three to enterprise IT, I don’t think they’ll be seen as the megatrends of this decade in hindsight. I suggest that, more than anything, we are witnessing a wholesale shift from information tied to place/device to information mobility. Cloud computing, server virtualization, and even flash memory are all contributors to this massive trend, along with the user-side trends of the post-PDA mobile phone, 3G data, social web services, and connected home.

What Is Mobility?

The meaning of mobility, to me, is expansive. It doesn’t just refer to taking a copy of your data with you, ubiquitous connectivity, or portable devices. Mobility is a new paradigm of computing.

• Your data no longer “sits” in one place – your data lives out there in the network!
• Your applications no longer “live” on this device or that – your applications live out there in the network!
• Your productivity environment no longer requires a particular piece of hardware – you expect to be productive everywhere on every device!

This doesn’t sound strange to the modern Internet user. We have completely accepted the role of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the rest in our personal lives. Just as they did in the early days of the PC, business people have transitioned these concepts into the professional world – witness Salesforce and LinkedIn! In all cases, we have endorsed the idea that certain types of information want to live in the cloud because it makes them better!

Once you’ve used these services, old-fashioned email, contact management, encyclopedias, maps, and the rest seem incredibly limiting. A GPS system that can’t update its maps seems antiquated, and we want it to have real-time traffic data, too. An iPod that needs to be physically connected to a PC to add music or applications is simply unacceptable. Time- and place-shifting technologies like TiVo To Go, over-the-air podcast downloads, and Slingboxes reset our expectations about availability and choice of entertainment, but they are mere symptoms of our changing perceptions. We want mobility of data, applications, and platforms, and we are getting it.

Consider two truly revolutionary platforms: the iPhone and the netbook. In both cases, we knowingly accept limitations in the name of portability, knowing that the cloud will give us what we can’t hold in our hands. These devices are limited in ways that would seem inconceivable just a few years ago: Apple has locked their platform up tighter than any in history, and netbooks are too small, underpowered, and cheap in all senses of the word. But we love them because they get us where we want to go, which is up and out!

Mobility and Enterprise IT

The concept of mobile data, applications, and devices is just as applicable to enterprise IT infrastructure as it is to personal technology. Some enterprise data must be kept close to the vest, especially where privacy laws and litigation concerns are applicable. But there is certainly a vast pool of corporate data that wants to be out working in the field! Setting this data free is the enterprise equivalent of the mobility megatrend!

Cloud computing is hype. Server virtualization is hype. Flash storage is hype. XaaS is hype. Web 2.0 is hype. But once the cloud of hype passes, we will be left with solid technologies to enable mobility and transform corporate computing. Why should corporate email have to punch through your firewall? Why should the intranet be limited to internal or VPN users? Why can’t customers interact with a (limited/controlled) set of your corporate records? Salesforce showed us that roaming users (sales teams) need greater access than most IT staff were ready to build. What if we applied the same ideas to other data types?

Many companies are already doing this. Microsoft offers a variety of internal/external services for their customers through Live (see Connect, for example). Many companies are using mail and productivity applications in the cloud from Google, MessageOne, and Zimbra. Backup and archiving as a service to mobile users is widespread (see Iron Mountain Connected and Mozy). And more and more corporate PR relies on blogs, twitter, and social networking sites. Corporate security and legal types are worried about data “escaping” from the eggshell of control they exert, but this cat is out of the bag. Enterprise IT will never be the same!

It comes down to a single core question that IT folks ought to have been asking themselves all along: What should be held internally and what should be let loose? We already “outsource” many non-core corporate functions. Sometimes we do this for cost reasons. But the most effective outsourcing decision is when a third party will do a better job, offering levels of expertise or service that an internal group could never realistically reach. We already buy enterprise software to leverage outside development (remember, this was not always the case!), so why not also buy enterprise services? Corporate-grade outsourced email, groupware, sales automation, and the like is not only more robust and less expensive than internal systems, they enable a disconnected, mobile workforce.

Today, I Was Angry

I bought a new album from Amazon, but I forgot to sync my iPhone with my laptop, so it was sitting at home when I wanted to listen to it in the car. Then I couldn’t find a colleague’s phone number because he moved to a new company and my address book didn’t automatically update. And I couldn’t review a presentation because I needed a special account to access a corporate document system behind a firewall.

These little accomplishments would have seemed like miracles just a few years ago: I remember the joy I felt ten years ago when I could read a web page offline on my Palm Pilot using AvantGo; I was amazed when I first fired up 802.11a wireless networking and could work anywhere in the office; I was gleeful to be able to take 5 GB of music with me on the train. But all this is past. Today, I want to access my portable data and work anywhere. We are in the midst of a revolution in the mobility and ubiquity of computing.

See my posts on Gestalt IT for similar enterprise IT infrastructure commentary

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Ten-Year Trend: Mobility
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Although Mac Rumors reports that the Skyhook Wi-Fi data trumps the Google cell tower data, the reality is much more complicated, and thankfully more reliable, too! See, I used to live in Massachusetts (where Skyhook has data) and now live in Ohio (where they don’t). So I was able to test the priority of the location data used in the iPhone in a simple way – I compared different good data/bad data scenarios to determine just how Apple is deciding what your location is.

The short answer is, they’ve done a great job programming this and are falling back gracefully when fed bad data. When you tap the location button on an iPhone, you’ll almost always get at least a reasonable location from it, except where Skyhook has bad data and you’ve got no cell service, which is rare enough to be useful.

But if you are using an iPod Touch or iPhone with no cell service, your location data can be woefully incorrect, and even easily spoofed! Although Google Maps location is (probably) not a life and death piece of data, we can be pretty happy with what we’ve been given. But I can think of a whole lotta pranking that could happen once this tech gets more widespread use!

More details after the jump…

How Skyhook Works

Skyhook relies on MAC addresses of visible access points, and doesn’t care if you’re logged into them or not. So if you’re walking down Main Street, and your device can see any Wi-Fi access points (hotspots, home routers, etc), it can grab the MAC address for location purposes. Over the last few years, Skyhook drove a fleet of cars around many major cities, sniffing for MAC addresses and correlating them to GPS data. It stored this information in a database and can use it to pinpoint locations.

Some have speculated that Skyhook could expand their list of known hotspots by using the very query data sent to them. See one we know and one we don’t? Just add the new one at the old one’s location! It’s not clear whether or not they’re doing this at this point, though. One thing Skyhook does not do is allow ad hoc queries or (until recently) updates to their database. But yesterday, iPhone Central reported that a user was given instructions on how to add their own access point to Skyhook’s database, which kind of scares me (see below)!

One trouble is, MAC addresses aren’t as unique as they’re supposed to be. Although nearly all manufacturers assign a unique MAC address to each device they make, these can easily be changed in software. There are many legitimate reasons to change a MAC – I’ve done it myself when replacing a failed access point, since it saved me from having to worry about reconfigure my clients. Although it’s not a great idea, some corporations that run large networks of hotspots might presumably use the same MAC on multiple devices for simplicity or through negligence when setting up new hardware.

The other problem with using access point MAC addresses for location data is that they’re not nearly as geographically-fixed as one might presume. In my example, I up and moved from one state to another, taking my router with me. The same thing could easily happen with a second-hand unit sold on eBay or given to a friend or family member. Imaging the havoc that Freecycle and Craigslist can cause to the Skyhook database as people move older routers from one address to another! Add in the growing number of roving access points in busses (LimoLiner), rental cars (Avis), and even private use (Airport Express, Delphi/Autonet) and you could be seeing lots of spurious traveling Wi-Fi hotspots!

Pranking Skyhook

Of course, not all false location data will come about by accident. It would be trivially easy to spoof the MAC address of a known Skyhook location in order to prank all those Apple-toting hipsters out there. Take some old Wi-Fi router, program it with the address of a Starbucks shop across town, and watch them scratch their heads looking for that short cappuccino! More nefarious schemes are easy to imagine, but at the end of the day all you’re doing is confusing the tiny subset of people who will use the location data of their iPhone or iTouch within range of your access point.

Plus, in my (limited) testing, it looks as if Skyhook will reject MACs that seem totally out of place if more than two others are in range. So there is some sanity checking going on, and that’s a good thing.

Digging Into Google’s “My Location”

Google announced their “My Location” service back in November, which uses cell tower triangulation to locate clients. In apparently sends some unique identifier of in-range (and in-network) cell towers to a Google server and attempts to determine location based on the (known) location of those towers. Since they don’t have very precise data on the location of every tower, Google admits that their precision can vary from acceptable to just plain bad.

In my experience, urban towers are much more precise than rural ones, both in terms of accuracy and precision. In the rural Ohio county where I live, the towers seem to be centered on townships, so the results are not at all accurate. Plus, rural towers cover a greater area, so their precision is expressed in tens of miles. But in the cities I’ve tried my iPhone in, the tower location is much more accurate, often allowing me to play “spot the tower” based on the Google Maps crosshairs!

How the iPhone Uses Location Data

So how does Apple integrate Google’s cell tower data and Skyhook’s Wi-Fi data? When you press the Location button, the iPhone sends both cell tower and Wi-Fi data (via an encrypted HTTPS session) to a server with an Apple IP address. Something happens there (presumably involving queries to Google and Skyhook servers), and a response is sent to the iPhone, presumably containing a center and radius.

From my experience (see the table below), the iPhone/iTouch Google Maps location server uses the following logic:

1. If the cell location and the Wi-Fi location agree, use the Wi-Fi location
2. If the cell location and the Wi-Fi location disagree, use the cell location
3. If only one is available, use that

This is a nice bit of logic, since the accuracy of cell tower data is more reliable than Wi-Fi, but is far less precise. So someone (smartly) took the unreliability of Skyhook’s data into account when programming all this!

Sadly for iPod Touch users, though, they only have Skyhook data, so they are likely to get frequent head scratchers when pressing the location button! Expect a rash of comedic posts starting with “my iPod Touch thinks I’m in Topeka!”

It looks like Apple is only sending cell data to Google and Wi-Fi data to Skyhook, though, since Skyhook still has my Wi-Fi location totally wrong even after a week of experimenting. So even though this could have been a valuable way for Skyhook to update and expand their database, it doesn’t look like they are.

Test Details

See For Yourself!

Experimenting with YouTube, I decided to up a video of my location magically changing from Ohio to Massachusetts! See for yourself!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | How Much Can You Rely On the iPhone’s Google Maps Combination of Skyhook Wi-Fi and Cell Tower Data For Pseudo-GPS?
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.