iPhone 3G GPS Bug

The other day I noticed that my new iPhone 3G was inexplicably failing to locate my position. At first I thought it might be a hardware issue, but I decided to Google around to see what I could find before contacting Apple.

Turns out there’s some kind of bug that can cause the GPS to stop functioning. The consensus on the web seems to be some kind of conflict with Auto-Lock. I found a solution on MacRumors that said to set Auto-Lock to never (Settings/General) and then reset network settings (Settings>General>Reset).

This worked like a charm, but I found that setting Auto-Lock to never isn’t such a great idea for me. I use my iPhone, as I imagine many people do, as an alarm clock. The alarm went off, I turned it off then eventually got up and showered. It wasn’t until I was dressed and ready to go that I noticed my screen was still on and about a quarter of my battery drained – Lame! So set Auto-Lock went back to 1 minute.

The next day the GPS went on the fritz again so I decided to forego setting Auto-Lock and just reset my Network Settings. This worked and I haven’t had to reset it since while Auto-Lock is still set to 1 minute.

So what’s the real problem? You’ve got me. Hopefully Apple will address this in the 2.1 firmware update.

If you know something I don’t about this please post it in the comments.

UPDATE: As far as I can tell Apple have sorted this one out as of the 2.0.2 firmware. I haven’t had any issues with it for some time.