According to the article "U.S., E.U. agree on common GPS-Galileo signal design" at EETimes, The United States and the European Union are moving forward on a common system of satellite navigation after reaching an agreement on a joint civil signal for the technology. The US system, called Navstar GPS, is the only fully operational GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) currently in use, though the EU's Galileo project is in the initial stages of deployment. The new agreement eliminates compatibility and security issues, and will allow makers of GPS equipment to increase their devices interoperability by utilizing the new common signals, dubbed GPS L1C and Galileo L1F. The European Commission's Director-General Matthais Ruete says the agreement will "facilitate the rapid acceptance of Galileo in global markets side by side with GPS."

This probably means that we're going to begin to see a whole sets of new chips / devices working with both systems in the near future. This will add better accuracy for location based services (LBS).

Geocaching only gets easier...

This time I'll continue the subject of QA (part 1, part 2).

As you know, probably the only way of discovering all defects in a product is long-term use by many users. Unfortunately this can be achieved after the product is on the market. Since this kind of feedback would be very valuable, user experience should be simulated in some way. TRUE should help to solve this problem. According to "S60 Smartphone Quality Assurance" book, Testing Real User Experience (TRUE) is normally carried out as soon as the product can be used in a meaningful manner, in other words, once the product has enough functionality to be used by anyone. It provides feedback from real-life usage during the R&D phase, when fixing is still possible. TRUE testing doesn't need any test cases because a selected set of people from a target consumer group are using the product prototype in the way they want to. These people are trained to report all defects they discover in the product. So now everybody can understand why some people from sites like allaboutsymbian, my-symbian or others reports that their 'protos' works slowly (in prototypes many things are logged to provide some valuable information).

Please note one more thing - it has also been said that "one fix creates five new defects in the system" (sad but true).