Originally Posted by
Looigi
Smart phones have GPS, records tracks, stores POIs, logs pix as a function of coordinates, etc. No data plan, cell plan or cell reception is needed to perform these functions. Apps and maps can be download while connected via WIFI and tracks, POIs, pix can be uploaded via WIFI.
Note that I've found this to be quite unreliable.
They generally have the capability, yes, but they leave the GPS turned off to save battery when possible, so when you do take a picture it has to turn the GPS on real quick and use it to try and get a fix, and it seems that if it can't do so quickly enough it'll use coordinates from cell phone or wifi location instead, and that is much less accurate. The cell phone tower triangulation is especially bad and can be like a quarter mile off. Which may or may not be acceptable.
And looking at the location EXIF data from my iPhone 5's pictures, some of it's
really wonky -- like in other cities, dozens of miles away. No idea why. At least in some of those cases, the coordinates were truncated -- like a latitude of 30 N rather than 30.2513 N, but not all.
I've found similar problems with the two cameras I've got that have built in GPSs -- they're "lazy" about getting GPS data and will update it it infrequently, and if the camera shuts off (often just due to inactivity) it forgets all the GPS lock information it had before so it takes a while to find out where it is again. One camera will just keep using the old location for a while in that situation, and the other just won't record any location data.
I've done a lot of this, and I've found nothing that works as well as 1) having a GPS keep track of your path data, and 2) either keeping the camera clock exactly right or knowing exactly how far it is off so that you can correlate the two. Now, perhaps the professional camera equipment works better than the point and shoots with gpses that I've used, but I haven't tried it. (For example, I'd hope the Canon GP-E1 would work well.)