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General

Tracks on a plane

On my last flight home, I found that the GPS on my HTC Wildfire phone works fine in ‘airplane’ mode. It is, after all, only a receiver. I had to hold it up to the window for a while to get a fix on enough satellites, but after that it worked well for a while. The plane was flying at about 500mph, keeping to the same altitude pretty closely. I had the OSMAnd (open streetmap) app installed, and was able to see exactly where we were and just how quickly a plane flies on a streets-and-towns level map.

It’d be cool to have an augmented-reality version that let you point the phone camera out the plane window and tell you what towns and hills you were looking at. Not sure if the existing apps will work at 30,000ft or not!