iPhone – Path Tracker test
My first purchased app from the App Store: Path Tracker version 1.1. Also at PathTracks.
Path Tracker is an iPhone 3G application that displays your path on a map as you move.
View the distance you’ve traveled, elapsed time, average speed, latitude, longitude, and altitude.
Path Tracker is perfect for recording your route while walking, running, hiking, biking, boating or traveling on any kind of trip. Path Tracker turns your iPhone into a speedometer, odometer, stopwatch, altimeter, and GPS location tool.
Now, for only â¬0,79 there’s nothing much that can go wrong, eh? A little testing: 4 minutes after I bought it, I went outside and gave it a try.
As soon as I left my house – and hence lost the WiFi-connection to my Linksys WRT54GL – I was presented with the screen as shown on the left. No Internet? No maps for you! …
So I turned on the 3G-network, but with no effect today. T-Mobile is sure missing the boat here!
Nevertheless I started walking around the so called “Zuiderhaven”, a 5 to 10 minute walk depending on my speed. Once home again I was automagically reconnected to my WLAN and the map on the right showed up.
As you can see from the picture on the right it pretty well tracked my goings, though it looks like I was kind of drunk. I can’t remember hitting any cars, trees or walking through houses… 
Maybe the unstable course was also caused by the fact that I checked the iPhone a couple of times while walking, to see if it was going into stand-by. It was not. So I’m not sure what the effect of battery-drain will be on longer walks (say: more than 10 kilometers). I could also try “Path Tracker” while cycling to work this week (10 / 15 minutes).
In the end I enjoyed a short, summer nights walk in my pretty hometown. And besides, I tried to “compete” with one of Bruce’s excellent blogposts about the iPhone and GPS navigation! 
I don’t understand why you didn’t get maps once outside of your WiFi range: so much for “the Internet in your pocket”, huh?
You might also be interested in iTrail, which is rapidly evolving. You can export your track logs to GPX or KML and the 1.2 version adds time stamps so you can use your iPhone as a data logger for photo geotagging.
As far as battery drain goes I took my 2G iPhone out for a 2h 20min walk with iTrail active, WiFi turned on, screen not dimmed. Although I did get a “less than 20% power remains” message, it did last the distance.
I’m a bit surprised by your accuracy of 47m—I hope that isn’t typical for iPhone 3G. The accuracy of the data loggers I’ve been using of late is supposed to be 5m.
Well… I was kind of disappointed to not have any internet also. I’m still not sure if it is iPhone or provider-related.
Regarding the accuracy: since it’s GSM-based (so not GPS) I didn’t expect it to be more accurate anyway.
Specific WordPress plugin created…
http://www.geekant.co.uk/2008/08/17/wordpress-instamapper-google-maps-plugin/
@Andy: that’s cool! Just gave it a try…
Would be nice if I could give the “title” the same bold appearance though as the rest.