Took a hike with the boys this afternoon and tried out MotionX GPS on the iPhone 3GS and its new background Track Recording capability. In previous versions, one needed to turn on the GPS and leave the app running in order to track. If you hit the power button or opened another app, it would stop background tracking. In order to use it, therefore, you would turn down the screen brightness when it was tracking. Regardless, the iPhone would warm up considerably when tracking. This led to some pretty poor battery performance when using the app.
Today, we went out for a 40 minute hike with about 42% of battery life remaining.
I was able to switch to email (which pinged every 15 minutes with new emails on the hike) and other apps while hiking, and the Track Recorder never missed a beat. I was able to hit the power button with no loss of tracking as well. We took some photos and uploaded to Facebook, surfed the web, and sent some email as well. When we returned to the house, I had about 22% of battery life left. Looking in the app tray, I discovered that I had 16(!) apps in there, which could be a contributing factor to the giant power suck. Based on this rate of consumption, though, we should be able to go gout for several hours and get decent tracking data before having to recharge the phone.
Well done, MotionX. I finally feel like I can use the GPS the way it was intended.
Leave a comment