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I had a Fuji point-and-shoot with GPS built-in nearly 15 years ago. The problem with GPS built-in to hardware is that it takes like 30-60 seconds of standing st

I had a Fuji point-and-shoot with GPS built-in nearly 15 years ago. The problem with GPS built-in to hardware is that it takes like 30-60 seconds of standing still to get a lock on the satellites, it doesn't work indoors, and so on. Phones work around this by downloading ephemeris data and triangulating using the cell towers and nearly Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, things that a camera can't do without incorporating a whole phone with SIM card into the camera and burning battery.

dbspin 2y ago
That's a bit of a red herring. Why do cameras integrate so poorly with phones, which could provide this information, backup and upload images etc. Same is true of professional video cameras, which are used for much longer periods of time in a single place, turned on etc. It's a mindset thing with camera manufacturers, running enormously outdated software with terrible UX on underpowered processors.
- a96 2y ago
  Battery life. A good camera will have a standby time of months and will do heavy image processing for days on one charge. And that's a key feature. It's also one of the reasons most people quickly turn off features like GPS and WIFI in their cameras. They're relatively useless and a massive battery drain. But yes, it could still be made better by waking up the radios fast and having e.g. reasonably smart tethering based on an open de facto standard spec that would be only woken up when the camera is switched "on" (which is mostly a key lock in many cameras, not a boot up).
  - dbspin 2y ago
    This isn't true at all of cinema cameras - which run off v-mount, b-mount etc type batteries and are expected to burn through them, and still face the same processor and feature limitations. There isn't (to my knowledge) a single cinema camera that supports bluetooth headphones for example, bizarrely.
Tor3 2y ago
Phones handle that this way, but it's not necessarily a good thing if that's the only way they can get the ephemeris data. I used to navigate in Japanese cities using not my phone, but my tablet. Worked fine. Then I changed to another tablet. Didn't work at all, could not. The only time I could get a GPS lock was if I could connect to a local wi-fi, which is not something easily done. Its GPS software clearly didn't even try to get the ephemeris date via the GPS signal, it relied 100% on network download. Which made it utterly useless, in the place where I needed it most - another country, non-EU at that, and my tablet doesn't even have a SIM slot, and if it did, I would have had to buy/get a SIM card (as would I for a phone, something I normally wouldn't need). In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.

dbspin 2y ago

That's a bit of a red herring. Why do cameras integrate so poorly with phones, which could provide this information, backup and upload images etc. Same is true of professional video cameras, which are used for much longer periods of time in a single place, turned on etc. It's a mindset thing with camera manufacturers, running enormously outdated software with terrible UX on underpowered processors.

a96 2y ago
Battery life. A good camera will have a standby time of months and will do heavy image processing for days on one charge. And that's a key feature. It's also one of the reasons most people quickly turn off features like GPS and WIFI in their cameras. They're relatively useless and a massive battery drain. But yes, it could still be made better by waking up the radios fast and having e.g. reasonably smart tethering based on an open de facto standard spec that would be only woken up when the camera is switched "on" (which is mostly a key lock in many cameras, not a boot up).
- dbspin 2y ago
  This isn't true at all of cinema cameras - which run off v-mount, b-mount etc type batteries and are expected to burn through them, and still face the same processor and feature limitations. There isn't (to my knowledge) a single cinema camera that supports bluetooth headphones for example, bizarrely.

Tor3 2y ago

Phones handle that this way, but it's not necessarily a good thing if that's the only way they can get the ephemeris data. I used to navigate in Japanese cities using not my phone, but my tablet. Worked fine. Then I changed to another tablet. Didn't work at all, could not. The only time I could get a GPS lock was if I could connect to a local wi-fi, which is not something easily done. Its GPS software clearly didn't even try to get the ephemeris date via the GPS signal, it relied 100% on network download. Which made it utterly useless, in the place where I needed it most - another country, non-EU at that, and my tablet doesn't even have a SIM slot, and if it did, I would have had to buy/get a SIM card (as would I for a phone, something I normally wouldn't need). In short - downloading ephemeris data from the internet is fine, but if it also cripples the whole thing by not using the embedded GPS ephemeris data.. horrible.