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By Greg Bartlett

With the recent rise of GPS technology, many people may appreciate the convenience of a cell phone as a GPS tracking system. However, there are a few areas where these systems are not quite up to par.
Several things can happen to hinder its use as a GPS tracking system. The cell phone could lose reception inside a building or move out of range of the towers. Cell phones also use low power chips for their GPS tracking because they are more inexpensive and they are easier on battery life. This means that cell phones are not as accurate as other GPS trackers and they can only give an approximate location.

Cell phone batteries are continually being drained by the many functions that they are now used for. A combination of constant text messaging, sending and receiving email, surfing the internet, taking pictures, and listening to music will quickly kill a cell phone battery, which eliminates the tracking ability because the cell phone must be turned on and running properly in order to function as a GPS receiver.

There are also a few ways that the cell phone owner can keep from being tracked. “Forgetting” the phone at home or keeping it turned off prohibits them from being tracked. The cell phone user can also disable the tracker feature, which makes it difficult to track someone who does not want to be tracked.

Because of these many reasons, cell phone trackers do not measure up to the high standards of a quality GPS tracking system. Traditional GPS tracking devices are continually giving out strong signals that point to an exact location. These signals can be viewed on a digital map by computer that literally show a trail of everywhere that GPS tracking system went.

The battery life of passive tracking devices will last longer than cell phone batteries and active systems (also called real time trackers) send a signal out, but do not store any of the location information on the system, allowing its battery to work for a very long time.

So while cell phones are great communication devices and can also be used as mini-computers, cameras, and CD players, they are not good GPS trackers. Although GPS tracking on cell phones may improve in the next several years, they have a long way to go before they can start competing with traditional tracking systems.