There was a phone I used to own, that I didn’t like because the GPS was not always tracking properly, it did the job, but when you interfered at all with the signals, say change visibility at all to the sky, it wouldn’t receive, it was a Galaxy S Vibrant, and from what we found out through other forums, it wasn’t just the Vibrant, but about every Galaxy S variant. They came out with an update eventually that helped, but it pails in comparison to the phone i use now as far as sensitivity and acquisition, and I’ll have to also say with accuracy. I run the Nexus S 4G and I was skeptical at first that it would be any different than my experience with the Vibrant, but it was night and day. This GPS in this phone is so much better. I get in places like inside stores and malls that never occurred with the Vibrant, I get in my house, even in the lower level that never happened with the Vibrant. I mean, I could get it upstairs by a south facing wall, but these are just examples.
I would test them out in displays at stores if you are really ambitious about the quality. If it can get a 10m lock or better inside the store, such as my phone is capable, then it will be far more accurate when in the clear and open view to the sky outside, in your car dock. Just my opinion, but I also deal a lot with GPS on a daily basis in my line of work with aviation and I have a different standard for these type of things. One thing I did recently with my phone is I took it out to a park with hiking trails and opened up Google Maps to get satellite imagery of where we were while on the trails, it was pretty impressive in my opinion to be able to do something like that. Granted, it didn’t have a location near me to lock my location to say like navigating, but it was a fun experiment nonetheless.
There is one other thing too, and not sure about Apple products doing this or not, as there is always this Android can do this, Apple can do this talk… but here is one thing I like to do with my phone, that I am not sure you could do with an iPhone, so correct me if I am wrong.
I like to run Waze when I am going somewhere almost every time, but if there is a descrepancy with a location in Waze or the inability to route over 1k miles currently, I’ll run Google Navigation at the same time and they both run simultaneously and I can still listen to Slacker cached content for those moments of spotty cellular coverage on the roads. That is one benefit that I have always heard of for Android in the plus column, but that may be old ways of thinking as I don’t know the current capabilities of Apple phones and I am not here to debate that, but to share my experience. Hope you find what fits you best. And even though you might get accurate paves in, you’ll still need to edit them before they go live, and in most cases, you’ll realize they need to be edited geometry wise anyways.