Location, location, location

Location-based apps are the new social networking, it seems like. Google Now is the most prominent example of the genre, a year old now – assuming you use Google for everything, Google Now will mine your mail and calendar, and correlate with your location, to produce things like traffic for your commute.  Or transit stops as you approach them.  Or your boarding pass as you approach flight time.  It’s at once tremendously cool and unbelievably creepy.

Google Now came to iOS with a recent update of the Google search app, and was immediately awash in controversy because it was allegedly hell on battery life.  Google promptly released an update – some said it actually made changes, some said it just advertised how the app works.  But it wasn’t the only option – almost as soon as Google Now was announced, other companies began working on iOS workalikes.

I wiped my iPhone 5 and set it up from scratch a couple weeks back, in hopes of dealing with the ongoing battery life issues.  I’ve put things back one step at a time, and this past week I tried out Google Now, then Osito, then Saga, then Donna – four of the most prominent location-aware real-time info apps on iOS.  By and large, the battery impact wasn’t that bad – Osito and Saga seem like they were slightly worse than Google Now or Donna – but the bigger problem is, they didn’t really give me anything I could use.  I have two different worksites and none of the apps do a good job accounting for that, while the option to automate calling into meetings isn’t much use if the calendar event for the meeting doesn’t include the teleconferencing data (thanks a lot, boss).  The weather information is, quite frankly, all over the damned place (I’m currently running an experiment testing six weather apps and their predictions against the actual recorded data at a known good National Weather Service airport facility).  And honestly, without access to my email, none of them can really do any kind of mining for other types of data.

The problem is, this kind of location-aware app isn’t something I have a tremendous use case for at the moment.  I don’t travel around that much, least of all for work; I haven’t been on a plane in almost a year. None of them would pop up scores for me (not that I have many right now), and I have alerts set for that anyway via AtBat or ESPN Scorecenter or Sportacular.  Google Now was supposed to produce nearby restaurants or attractions, but I guess I just don’t go anywhere that draws on those.  As with so much of social networking (looking at you, Foursquare), the utility of these sorts of apps is not for the likes of me.

There was one other location-based app that I was very interested in – an iOS port of Ingress, the highly-addictive Android-based game that layers a secret war between two opposing factions on top of real-world geography. In theory, it sounds like an incredible good time, and if it were closer to The Secret War’s battle between Templars and Illuminati, I would have been all in (of which more later).  As it is, I couldn’t sort out the game mechanics enough to make the juice worth the squeeze, and it got wiped with everything else.  I don’t think it had that much impact on battery life, but why take the risk?

As it turns out, the two biggest battery draws are predictable.  One is Twitter.  Constantly reloading Twitter is pretty much guaranteed to destroy the phone’s battery in short order.  The other is signal strength – when Verizon’s LTE network gives out, what’s behind it is the same old CDMA-based 3G or worse, with a top speed of maybe 2Mb.  And if a Verizon iPhone can’t find a signal, it will burn the battery like Cheech and Chong at a Phish concert as it grasps for the nearest tower.  By staying off Twitter and steering clear of dead zones, I was routinely coming home at the end of the day with 50% battery life despite using the phone normally all day in every other respect, including for multiple hours of podcast-listening.

In the end, Verizon was a necessary evil – their LTE network is still the best built-out in the Bay Area, it ships with the SIM slot unlocked, and it has the best available bands for international travel.  But I’m very pleased that I’m not paying for this myself, especially when T-Mobile’s fallback network in the absence of LTE is an order of magnitude faster than Verizon’s.  The true test of a mobile device and network is how each degrades.  Plus, T-Mobile is the only carrier that actually spares you the cost of a device subsidy on your service – Verizon and AT&T will gladly let you pay full price for an upgraded phone and then still shaft you with the subsidy-boosted service rate.

This is not a return to phone glee, not by a long shot – I’m looking forward to iOS 7, which should run a treat on my iPhone 5.  That said, I’m very eager to see how the Moto X works out – a phone from Google (however indirectly) which will hopefully be running clean Android 4.3 and actually providing some of the alleged innovation about use-case awareness (it knows when you’re driving, it knows when it’s in your pocket, it knows when you’re giving it a command, and it knows how to save power). Too, there may well be a new Nexus 7 tablet next week, and that could be hard to keep my hands off – I still don’t have any meaningful real-world Android experience, and that’s no way to live in a modern mobile world.

Ultimately, the biggest location-based feature of the iPhone is that it goes everywhere with you.  I’ve spent thirteen years now trying to make a mobile device do more for me, and ever since the launch of the iPhone 4, you can make a pretty good case I’ve had it.  Between the soundtrack of my life, the picture to narrate it, and the social communication to keep me in touch with people, it really is the indispensable device in a way that simply wasn’t possible when I first came to California.

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