One of the comments on my post about the HTC Shift's two operating systems has led me to a pretty interesting discovery. There's a GPS in there!
In the screenshots of the tools in the HTC Debug Tools folder there is an icon called HTCGPSTool.
This led Hugo to ask if there was in fact a GPS in the device.
I had investigated this tool breifly over the weekend but it seemed a pretty basic tool and I had assumed that it was there to test an external GPS such as a bluetooth unit. The comment got my interest up and I had some time on the train on the way to work, so I decided to investigate further.
I started up the debugging tool. There is a dropdown box with Com Ports listed. By default it was on COM4. I clicked on Open and low and behold I started seeing GPS strings in the output window. I changed it to a different COM port and clicked open - and I got an error saying it could not find a GPS device. Clearly the tool actually thinks there is a GPS in there.
I swapped back to COM4 and opened the port. There are a number of tabs that show GPS information if you have a fix (which I didn't) and another radar display that shows the satellites that the device can see. Initially there weren't any (hey I was on a train) but suddenly I saw one pop up. It dropped off again a minute later. I kept the GPSTool running when I got off the train. As soon as I got out of the station and into some fairly open ground I got a satellite again. Within 100m I had three more and even (breifly) got a fix. Not bad in the middle of the CBD as the valleys between the buildings play hell with a GPS. At my desk I can see one satellite - so I recorded a short video of the tool and clicked through the tabs before I had to give the device back.
So it would seem that the device does have a functioning GPS internally that is accessible inside of the Windows Mobile OS. There is not, however, any software installed to actually use the GPS in Windows Mobile.
But - as I mentioned in my previous post is is possible to connect the Windows Mobile OS and the Windows Vista OS via Windows Mobile Device Centre over a "virtual" USB connection. This means that it may be possible to install moving map software such as TomTom onto the Windows Mobile OS from Vista.
I could not find a way to access the GPS device from the Vista OS, nor could I see it listed in device manager.