I was thinnking of buying a GPS "puck" for use with my laptop
but as the BB 8800 has GPS built in i was wondering if there's anyway to get the GPS data out of that via bluetooth ? does it present NEAMA data to any of the BT COM ports ? or is there software available to make it do that ?


thanks in advance



Glen

No, this cannot be done. It has been tried many times.

correction, I meant NMEA of course....


but thanks for the reply

when you say this has been tried many times do you have any resources you can point me at on the web or any other threads on this forum ? i cannnot seem to find anything pertaining to it.

do you know if it's a physical hardware limitation or just that the software is not available or has never been written to do this ?

the BB8800 has a sirf star III GPS chip which is capable of NMEA
Programs like mologogo and blackberry tracker are capable of pulling some kind of location data from it (if not NMEA) and feeding that to a remote site via GPRS so why not the same info to a Bluetooth serial port. or am i misunderstanding the nature of the problem ?>

I was wondering whether I would be able to use 8800 built in GPS with Google Maps Plus via bluetooth.

The 8800 does GPS poorly in the first place so even if you got it to work, it would not do well!

I agree with Greg. I found that the Cell Tower Triangulation method in Google Maps, for my 8320, works better than the GPS did in my 8800.

I'm not sure why you are saying the GPS performs poorly in the 8800. I found it to be extremly accurate- it does as well as any of my Garmins. I currently have loaded the Garmin, Mapquest and Telenav software on my 8800 and my 8820 and have had them loaded for months. They perform flawlessly with the usual GPS accuracy. By the way I bought all programs because I couldn't decide which was better.
Jim

I have had no problem with my 8800 and GPS.

wow, so your GPS was showing 300-2500m accuraccy? there is NO way you were using GPS on the 8800 then. I have had 8800s, 8820s, and 8830s, and all give between 10-20m of my location. that is a far cry from cell triangulation.

Sorry but my Garmins blow my 8820 out fo the water. Not even close. The Colorado 400c is showing accuracy of 10 feet

What is the accuracy of your 8820?

I understand the bubble encompassed more, but the location dot was spot on or reasonably close. Several times with the 8800 GPS it would show me at least a half a mile away or more, especially near my parents house, and it will not work at in my place of work while the Cell Tower method does with surprising accuracy.

GPS won't work very well indoors. You have to be outside with a clear view of the sky.

I understand, hence I mentioned both outdoors (near parent's house) and indoors (work)

I am also interested in pushing the neama information via bluetooth to other devices. So I called RIM and asked if it was possible. They said it is, but it has to be done by writing your own application to interact with the GPS API they have on the phone.

As I am just learning C++ this is a bit above me. There is ALOT of information on there developers website though.

I know there's an FOSS GPS datalogger that will provide you a base for obtaining the GPS data. You would "simply" need to figure out how to pump NMEA over bluetooth. I haven't done much with the bluetooth on the BB, but I would have to expect it may be too limiting to put it out properly.

FYI, you'll want to focus your learning on Java, as that's what the primary language for the platform is.