In the last few days we've played two different Wherigo cartridges on our iPhones. One iPhone 4 and one iPhone 4S.
Battleship:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=cd34bf6c-5026-44ad-8efb-a5477b8190b4
Whack-A-Lackey
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=bec0ada7-5310-482e-9927-2d16edac9a21
While the iPhone seems to play the cartridges well, I'm not convinced it can consistently and reliably replace a full blown Garmin GPSr.
Consistent behavior:
-GPSr accuracy on the iPhone never got less than 16 feet on either model.
-There is a noticeable delay in the phone GPSr accurately tracking movement.
-Although both cartridges displayed an unlock code, neither displayed the cache location when the cartridge was successfully completed. This happened whether it was played at the posted coords or within the 20 mile distance allowed.
-Cartridge does not resume if apps were closed without a graceful exit. App consistently crashed after that, requiring starting the cartridge over from scratch.
Battleship behavior:
-Tracking delay. This was more annoying than crippling as the cartridge was not time sensitive. By using the Google maps display it was possible to go to a location and wait for the pin to catch up before firing at the ships.
-Cache coordinates not displayed even though cartridge completed. This cartridge was played at posted coords on a sunny day.
Whach-A-Lackey behavior:
-Cache coordinates not displayed even though cartridge completed. This cartridge was played at posted coords on a sunny day and also at the coords for the Battleship cartridge.
-Tracking delay and GPSr accuracy. This proved quite aggravating given the proximity and time restrictions on the cartridge. The best score I recorded on the Lackey mode setting was 619, and this was guaranteed lower than it should have been. On every game I had several lackeys that showed distances less than 5 feet and the unit would not register them as whacked, thus wasting precious time and also missing points. I was able to test out a version of the cartridge with a larger proximity to match the iPhone GPSr accuracy. Although it registered the lackeys more accurately, there were still some it refused to acknowledge.
-Lua Alert: not even sure what caused this but I saw it several times referencing "parameter is not a table"
As I said, the iPhone will play the cartridges which I am happy about, and most times the accuracy delay can be accomodated, but not getting the cache coords when a cartridge is completed is a problem. I'm not sure where the root cause for that issue is though.
I'll still keep playing them on the iPhone. We don't have very many in our home area and the iPhone will work for these, while we'll keep using the trusty 60CSx for geocaching. Not worth springing the bucks for a new Garmin just to play cartridges, even if there are a few other nice features. Besides, the iPhone Geocaching app from Groundspeak works quite well, and I can sync an offline copy of my GSAK database to use in iGeoKnife.
