TomTom & Build In GPS on Phones
Ok this basically follows on from the previous post. I did actually get the phone configured correctly. The only problem was that it was crashing a lot. I mean, I’d go to pick up a call and it would crash. I’d be responding to an SMS and it would crash. I’d be *on* the phone and it would crash (yeah, it was fun explaining that to the client, especially how WM5 takes 60 seconds to reboot).
Anyway I was running around the system looking for settings to change. Things to turn off. Things to minimize what could be causing the crashes. I bumped into an option in the settings in the shape of a green tree. There was no title on it (it was squares, meaning non-unicode text), so I figured it must have been installed by the OEM, not by Microsoft. I opened it up, and all the text there was non-unicode too, except for the numbers 1234. Well, it looked like a confirmation code of some sort. I thought it might let me into the developer section, or testing section, or something-that-would-help section. I wrote the numbers in the box and hit the grey button (which was also unlabeled). The phone restarted. Woohoo, progress? Well, the phone started and it had factory reset the whole thing. Contacts: Gone. Calendar: Gone. Installed applications: all gone. Everything. Gone. On the upside, the little green tree now had a title: “Master Clear”. Well. That explains it.
Anyway, I reinstalled all the applications and themes, and applied the appropriate reg edit fixes. So far so good. I went to use TomTom for the GPS and it asked me what COM port the device was on. I couldn’t remember. TomTom is good in the fact that it scans the COM ports on the system to see if it gets a response from any ports. That means when it gives you options of the ports, you are only seeing ports that have devices on them. I have 3 options.
It turns out, one of those ports was from the Microsoft GPS intermidiate driver: Configured through Settings > GPS. I tried playing around with that and couldn’t get TomTom to talk to the GPS through it. I then tried TomTom on the other 2 serial ports, trying all baud rates, but TomTom kept giving me “No GPS device”.
Well I delved into the registry editor again to see if the registry held any information about attached hardware (similar to the device manager in Windows 98 / XP). It does. Local Machine > Hardware > Active. It showed me all the active hardware interfaces and the drivers used for them. I found out that one of the COM ports was an infrared port. Well, that explains why that didn’t work. The other COM port was just labeled as “Serial” meaning that it doesn’t know what the device on the other end is, but it talks normal serial port speak. I guess that was the GPS. Problem is, why didn’t it work in TomTom?
It took me a long time and lots of Google searching to uncover that the option in the Access tab of the GPS setting where it says “Automatically manage GPS data” actually does something. I’m still not 100% sure of what it does, but it does something. If I toggle it, it makes the GPS work in TomTom (when I have the right device & baud rate). If I change the device / baud rate in TomTom, it will say no device again, even if the settigs are correct. I have to toggle the “Automatically manage GPS data” every time I change the device settings. Thankfully, it doesn’t need to be done when restarting the application or device. It does work.