If you’re not familiar with the hobby/sport/addiction that is geocaching, the concept is very simple — people go out and hide caches in the great outdoors, use a GPS receiver to find the coordinates of the hide, then post the cache on the Geocaching.com Web site. Cachers go to the Web site, search for caches that are near their present location, and then use their GPS receivers to find the approximate location of the cache. Once they’re done bushwhacking and find the cache, they sign the logbook, take and place trade items, and then log the find on the Web site.

A week after I acquired my iPhone 3G, I wrote a post talking about how to use the built-in GPS receiver and Mobile Safari to “do” geocaching. While the method works well, I was waiting and hoping for a much better way to geocache with the iPhone 3G. With the recent release of Geocaching for iPhone, it’s time to see if that better way is finally here. Read on for more details!

To give Geocaching a workout, I decided to try the app while I was on a business trip in Sacramento, California last week. I love to go geocaching in cities that I’m visiting, since it’s a great break from doing work and I usually get to know some more about the city and its history.

The application icon for the app is your first indication that this is the official Geocaching.com app, as it uses the four-color Geocaching logo. Launching the app shows you a nice trail scene as well as the standard Geocaching.com disclaimer, and you’re asked if you wish to let the app find your location (see below left). Since you’re usually going to be going out of your way to find local caches, you’ll most likely give the app the OK to get the location from your iPhone’s GPS. The next screen (below right) provides fields for searching for caches by postal code, address, or the special Geocaching.com GC code. You can also tap the “Search for Nearby Geocaches” button to find the nearest caches to your location.

A list of geocaches near your current location appears on your screen (see below left). The current version (1.1.1) of the app now gives you a filtered list that does not show any caches that you’ve already found. To do this, you need to set your Geocaching.com user name and password in the app settings page (see below right).

The list shows a surprising amount of information for each cache. The icon on the left side of the search results indicates the type of cache, most being “traditional” caches with a little plastic container icon. The difficulty and terrain are listed as a number from 1 to 5, with a 5/5 being the most difficult type of cache to find, in mountainous or dangerous terrain.

Groundspeak, the company that runs Geocaching.com, assigns each cache a unique code beginning with the letters GC. That code is important as a unique key for the cache, so it’s included in the list. Finally, the distance and direction to the cache is listed.

Tapping on a cache entry in the list opens up a detail page (see screenshot below). This page shows the latitude and longitude of the cache and the same difficulty and terrain information, along with links to a description, recent logs, and a hint. The description will tell you something about the cache or historical information about the area in which the cache is hidden. The logs will show when and how people found the cache, sometimes including spoiler information that make it obvious where the cache is hidden. Hints are sometimes riddles that make it easier to find the cache, if you can figure out the correct answer to the riddle.

Tapping the Map button takes you out of the Geocaching app and opens Google Maps. A red pin indicates where the cache is located, and the traditional blue pin and pulsating circle show your present location. I often use the Directions feature of Google Maps to find out how to drive or to a location near a cache.I find it annoying that I am taken out of the Geocaching app and have to launch it again to get back to the cache information. It would be preferable if the app used its own browser.

The Navigate button opens a compass screen with a red pointer aimed at the cache location. Your current heading, the distance to the cache, your ground speed, and the accuracy of the GPS location are all displayed on the screen. The pointer can be helpful in triangulating the position of the cache, as GPS accuracy can sometimes be off and by walking around, you can get a better idea of where the cache is actually hidden.

How does this all work in practice?

If you’re in a city or in a wooded area, you can pretty much forget about getting an accurate location. Where I was looking for the cache in Sacramento, there were both tall buildings and trees that were in the process of dropping their leaves. According to the Geocaching app, the best accuracy I was getting was about 156 feet! I decided to try again with a cache located in an area with a much less obstructed view of the GPS satellite constellation.

The second cache was near my home in Colorado. The leaves have dropped here, and the sky view is unimpeded by tall buildings. I used the navigate mode to get a red arrow pointer showing me how to get to the cache, and it did an excellent job of getting me to within about 20 feet of the cache (see screenshot below). However, the arrow was confusing me as it was whipping around the points of the compass, so I switched to the Google Maps view. Here I was able to see two pins — a flashing blue one that indicated my location, with a blue ring around it indicating the possible area I was in — and a red one for the location. With the Google Maps aerial view enabled, I could even see the trees near the cache location.

If you’re not sure if the area where you’re caching has a good view of the sky, I suggest trying a simple test — walk around the area with Google Maps pulled up. If your “blue pin” is consistently keeping up with your walk, your accuracy is probably pretty good. If it is the blue pin is a block away and just sitting in one place, or if it jumps around the map, then you’re out of luck and should either use a much more accurate GPS receiver or find another location to do your caching.

One more thing that Geocaching for iPhone can do is let you find the status of Trackable Items (see below). These are specially tagged items such as geocoins and travel bugs that are left in caches for others to grab and move to other caches.

This version of Geocaching is limited in what it can accomplish. I’d love to be able to claim my caches when I find them, instead of having to go back to my computer to log into Geocaching.com and do the deed. It would be cool to be able to use the iPhone’s camera to add photos to the cache log on the Geocaching website.

Should a hard-core geocacher give up his or her dedicated GPS receiver and move to an iPhone? No. I don’t think the accuracy of the GPS location is as good as some of the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) enabled GPS receivers that you can buy from Garmin, Magellan, and TomTom. With most “real” GPS receivers, I find myself being able to find caches much faster. I think the iPhone is getting me in the general area, but not with enough accuracy to rmake my hunt much easier.

Between my comments about what Geocaching for iPhone needs and about the accuracy of the iPhone GPS, you might think that I’m totally dismissing the iPhone and this app as a geocaching solution. I’m not. I feel that it’s a good solution, and it can only get better as the app is updated with new features and the iPhone gets even better location accuracy in the future.

I’d love to hear what other iPhone-toting geocachers are using as their favorite geocaching tool. Is it an iPhone with Geocaching for iPhone or another app, or do you prefer to use a separate GPS receiver. Leave a comment below.

I don’t usually write reviews of products I haven’t tried (in fact, I’m frequently annoyed by those who do), but iTrans stubborn refusal to lower the price on their NYC product has been sticking in my craw a bit, and I have to throw my $.02 in the ring with others who have exhorted them to do so. I have to say that iTrans seems to be a little confused on the psychology and science of setting price points for software. Consider just these 3 factors:
1. Similar Products in the iTrans portfolio: iTrans makes this product for several other cities, but none of them are as expensive as the NYC version. Are they banking on the “everything is more expensive in NYC” mentality? Well, that would be downright silly (and I’m sure they know that New Yorkers reject that sentiment outright, and will actively push back when they encounter it). The fact is, we look at it and say “Why do the DC people get theirs for $5? I’m certainly not paying twice as much as them!“ Instead, I would guess that their argument is that the NYC version is more complex and demanded more development cost and resources on their end. While this may be true, we all know that the profit margin on software is pretty close to 100%, since there are no manufacturing or ongoing distribution costs. Lower the cost to compete with your other products, and you’ll make up the initial dev costs in sales volume pretty quickly. This is basic lemonade-stand economics.
2. Competition: There are other products competing with yours in the AppStore, and while they may not currently be as good as yours, the more people buy them (because they are cheaper), the more money they will have to sink in to development and they will quickly become better than yours - and sink you.
3. Market: Look at where people are spending their money in the AppStore. Do a quick sort by “most popular” in any category and you’ll see that most people are downloading apps that range in price between free and $4.99, with rare exceptions. The more the store becomes flooded with apps, the more this is going to drive these prices down even further. Most of the best apps I have on my iPhone were actually *free*, and released as part of a value-added strategy - extensions of larger, richer web based products. If iTrans doesn’t get on the boat soon, it won’t be long before HopStop or some similar company comes along with a better, cheaper product and deals the final, fatal blow.

MotionX GPS Lite

Rating:
MMMMM - Matters!

Until Apple gets busy with their upcoming GPS application, we must look elsewhere. One place to look first is the people that bring you MotionX Poker and MotionX Dice. The programs are wonderful, and they decided to step out of the game/dice area and move towards GPS. Their GPS application, entitiled MotionX GPS Lite, is equally phenominal and happened to make it to the first page of my iPhone.

Game maker MotionX has just released GPS Lite, a free iPhone3G GPS app which provides a number of features normally found on a dedicated handheld GPS device. GPS Lite has five screens: The GPS status screen provides your current position and signal status. A stopwatch screen provides stopwatch features plus speed, distance, average speed, and elevation change.

The navigation screen shows a simulated compass and bearings and headings. A track screen displays your current track, but on a white background, rather than a map. A waypoints screen shows start and stop points and other user - settable waypoints.

GPS Lite takes iPhone3G GPS to a new level, but does not offer turn-by-turn navigation. This is a “Lite” version so I went searching for the paid version and did not find one, so it seems likely a paid version with even more features is on the way. However, I am not quite sure what else they could bring that’ll make it better than a five-star app. We’ll see…

This app is a great app and Apple should think about looking towards them to see exactly how a GPS app is suppose to be. Occasionally, I felt some lag, but and the other day, it crashed on me. A simple restart of the iPhone cleared that up in no time. So, go try out the application; you are bound to love it!

App now available in the App Store
Price: Free

Pros:
Track elapsed time, speed, distance traveled, and average pace.
Provides the user’s current heading and the waypoint bearing; view current speed and ETA, and visualize bearings with a virtual compass. This also is an ideal tool for geocaching enthusiasts.
view the current position, GPS signal strength, and last valid satellite fix.

Cons:
Lags sometimes
No turn-by-turn directions…yet
Sometimes not as accurate, but probably due to low signal.