Now that firmware 2.0 is out, and everyone’s blogging their faces off about the new features of and/or failure to acquire their new 3G iPhones, I noticed a little nugget that’ll please iPod Touch owners that nobody else seems to have noticed yet:
Everyone with Maps on their pod will have noticed that it can sometimes find your position when you’re connected to a wi-fi network, but most of the time, there’s no point in leaving wi-fi on when you’re on the move, so this has gone relatively unnoticed:
The “locate me” button in Maps
can now be toggled… and if you leave it lit
blue, and you’re walking or driving through a reasonably urban or residential area with wi-fi on, Maps will pick up your location using networks you don’t have a password for. In the car this week, in a journey of just 4 streets, the iPod picked up about 8 networks on the way home, tracking us fairly accurately, if only every hundred feet or so.
It’s not quite GPS, and you wouldn’t want to drive using it, but if you’ve got enough map tiles loaded for your town/city, you can pretty much entirely fail to get lost ever again.