I have an iphone 3g. the gps is working because i can pull up google maps. my location services is toggled on, my wifi is toggled on, ive turned the phone off, and ive uninstalled and reinstalled waze. what the heck??
anyone have any more suggestions? thanks!!!
I have a 3GS and sometimes I have to wait 1 minute before the GPS is calibrated and activated by waze. Friends of my in the back seats have difficulties with keeping up the exact GPS location in waze while I’m driving (and I do not catch 3 mach or something 
).
My experience is that waiting a moment for calibration + your phone attached to your front window of your car works very fine. More inside the car = difficulties.
I haven’t tested this theory myself yet, but when Google Maps shows your location and Waze is still searching, does Google show your position as the throbbing point or the dot within a circle?
The dot within a circle indicates the uncertainty in your location – it knows within reason that you are somewhere inside that circle. But that circle can vary greatly in size.
And also, you may notice that the circle sometimes is somewhere pretty far off from where you are – this is actually the location of the cell tower you are connected to. The iPhone will default to that until it can get a GPS lock.
When Maps shows the dot throbbing with out a shaded circle around it, then that means that the phone has a “good” GPS lock and is very certain of you location.
Above is my understanding through experience. And based on that, my assumption is that Waze will only acknowledge the “good” lock and will ignore a less certain position. This is probably a very good thing since we don’t want lots of data recorded when the phone only knows you are within a 2 block radius as opposed to the specific road you are on.
Again, all of this is just my assumptions based on observation.
And I have experienced a great difference in signal quality for the phone on the dash close to the windshield vs. further away from the glass and under the roof. You also may have more luck in getting a strong signal as you drive towards the equator due to the GPS satellites and their geo-synchronus orbits (so as your windshield and phone face South while in the Northern hemisphere for example).
I’m having the same problem with my iPhone 3G & GPS. My GPS works great on Maps, etc., but as soon as I turn Waze on it doesn’t work. Yet if I pull Waze up on my phone in my house the GPS works great! SO frustrating. My dashboard isn’t reflecting any of my driving this month. We moved this month and I’ve driven over 1500 miles so far this month because of it, most of it with Waze on, yet there is no record of this. 
Waze hasn’t shown my location since Friday morning, and I’ve run it 4 or 5 times since then. I always toss my phone on the dash when I start the car, and it seems that connecting can be very inconsistent. Been running it on a Blackberry Tour 9630 since early this summer, and have probably missed 300+ miles of travel since then.
Most of the location based services (google maps etc.) will settle for a triangulated location. This can be done by cell towers and/or wifi locations. Many (not all) wifi routers have their coordinates on file somewhere. Although this is good enough for some services, Waze needs a real GPS signal for navigation. If you have Assisted GPS, it will lock faster as some data comes from the net, but a plain GPS may take a few minutes. The most important factor that you can influence is antenna location. It needs a view of the most sky that you can find. Good Luck.
Pulled battery before I drove home, and had no problem getting a signal. No idea if that was coincidence or not.