No, It Can't

It's been a few days since I wrote here and a lot of fun stuff has happened, which I will be sharing in the days to come. One item of note, as always, was Steve Jobs' keynote address at this years Macworld conference. Aside from introducing cool stuff like the Apple TV unit, he revealed the company's plans for the iPhone, pictured above.

Obviously, this is something that will revolutionize not only the music player industry, again, but also the mobile phone market and, though not really emphasized, the PDA sector. You can read the tech specs all over the web, including Apple's own site in addition to seeing Steve show off the phone's capabilities at the above links. As the phone's launch approaches, I will obviously be talking more about it, including the details of how I intend to pay off my Verizon contract in order to go with Cingular, the exclusive wireless provider for the iPhone. It is simply the must-have device which I can easily see becoming the only one I need to carry, even consigning my dear Powerbook to home.

What I wanted to address now, however, was a confusing bit of news seemingly being repeated over and over again by wire news services, most notably on CNN.com:

Click the picture for a larger view.

In the above screenshot, the news wire report which CNN, and presumably others, touts the addition to iPhone's other amazing features to be GPS capability.

Um, not so much.

The other features mentioned are certainly part of the technology behind the iPhone, as both listed on Apple's site and discussed extensively by Jobs during his keynote. At no time, however, did he mention the very cool but unrealistic option of using the ultra-thin phone as a GPS unit. Trust me, it's something he WOULD have gone over, in-depth.

Instead, what we have here is yet another example of a non-technically minded writer and/or sloppy editing resulting in misinformation about a new product combining multiple existing technologies and inventing some new ones along the way.

Most likely, the writer of the article noticed the phone has GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) capabilities, which are a far cry from GPS (Global Positioning System). Either through ignorance or laziness, a very important aspect of the phone is being mis-represented.

Yes, this could most certainly be seen as nit-picking on my nerdy part. However, to those who do not understand why there is a very real and important distinction between GSM and GPS, consider the difference between a flashlight and a laser. Both do, basically, the same thing yet with remarkably different power intensities and applications. Aside from the geek-factor, it's simply poor reporting.

I took the screenshot of the report, for posterity, as I am sure it will be corrected in future iterations of the story.

At least, I hope it is corrected.


UPDATE:

In the above post, I neglected to mention the news wire report CNN is repeating comes from the Associated Press and a wire story by Rachel Konrad, a technology writer for the service, with contributions by Jordan Robertson and Harry Weber. As I have taken Ms. Konrad to task enough already, I won't do more of the same here. Suffice it to say, I think others should contact her as well to alert her to this embarassing technical faux pas. She IS a "technology writer", after all. *rolls eyes*


UPDATE #2

Several readers have written me to suggest the GPS capabilities of the phone may be the E911 capabilities now required by law. This capability could very well utilize GPS location tracking or triangulation among wireless towers through a variety of methods.

This would be a valid point were it not for the fact that different carriers use different technologies. In Cingular's case, a method known as TDOA:

time difference of arrival (TDOA) works like GPS using multilateration, except that it is the networks that determine the time difference and therefore distance from each tower (as with seismometers)

Thus, we see that with Cingular not utilizing GPS, there is no need or possibility of GPS sensitivity to be present in the iPhone.