Instamapper – GPS Tracker

Having had an iPhone 3G for about 6 months I thought it was about time to have a go with some GPS Tracking software. The software I chose was the free GPS Tracker which records your location and uploads it to instamapper.com.

In order to use GPS Tracker you need to register an account in Instamapper.com, which is also free, and register your device in order to get a key to enter on the device. In all it takes about five minutes to get setup and it is a one time process.

The track I decided to record today was riding home from work. It’s not terribly far – only 2.4 miles according to Instamapper! – but it was good enough. First off I wasn’t sure how much of the route would be recorded. Due to restrictions imposed by Apple, iPhone apps can only record data when they are are running in the fore-ground and the iPhone is awake. I therefore had to set the Auto-Lock setting to never.

When got home, all I had to do to get the track data was to log into Instamapper.com. This allows you to see the latest data that has been recorded. Instamapper tried to intelligently separate the recorded data and, so far, has achieved it successfully for me. Instamapper provides a Google Map interface with the recorded points and the line joining them. The points are clickable and provide information about the time of the point, the co-ordinates, current head and speed. It is also possible to share your tracks by generating a html snippet to include in your website:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

From this initial test, it appears that the point recording rate isn’t that good for motorbikes. As you can see from the map above the track line does tend to cut corners. I’m not sure if this is due to the GPS Tracker software, iPhone limitations or something else. Personally I’d like to have a much higher recording rate, possible about once every couple of seconds, even if the software batched up the positions and sent them to the site every couple of minutes. Also, the accuracy of a couple of the plots is a little off but that could be due to the fact that I was riding along a narrow road with high buildings on either side.

Another feature of the Instamapper site is the ability to export your tracks to Google Earth kml files. I gave this a quick try but the points and the line didn’t appear to match up. Also, the points didn’t contain the information that is available on the map on the Instamapper website, which is a little disappointing.

Over all, GPS Tracker is a good effort but there is definitely room for improvement. I shall be contacting the Instamapper team with some ideas to make the service better and which I don’t think should take an awful lot of effort to implement.