So that’s it then – no more Google Latitude on my phone or the wifey’s.

It’s not that Latitude has lost its usefulness.  Far from it – it’s quite handy.  Rather, it has lost its practicality.

For whatever reason, Google took it upon itself to change the update frequency of Latitude, and this has had a noticeably-adverse affect on battery life.  Google’s own search engine will yield results explaining that the frequency went from something like 42/1 to 6/2 – ie, a 42 minute period when not moving and 1 minute when moving, to 6 minutes when not moving and 2 minutes when moving.

Now I don’t know if these numbers are correct, but I do know that something has definitely been amiss in the Latitude department for the past month or two.  It started when Shelly’s S60v3-based phone would no longer post Latitude updates.  Google seemed to have resolved this issue about a week ago, but in looking into the problem I came across other posts talking about increased battery usage, attributing said increases to the change in update/polling period.  So once functionality was restored on Shelly’s phone, I noted that she seemed to have gone from two or three days between requiring a charge, to needing to charge each night.  Hrmm.

So the first phone to have Latitude disabled was hers.  And wouldn’t you know it, battery life was magically restored.  And while I’ve always known that Latitude used some of our precious mobile battery life, I certainly couldn’t justify a 33-50% reduction in said life.

Battery life on my own phone is harder to characterize, as I tend do Do More Things(tm) on it, and I also tend to update my apps regularly.  Nonetheless, even with charging my phone in the car for one or both of the daily commutes, I was still getting alerts every night warning of 10-15% battery remaining – and I distinctly recall the ability to do a good amount of web browsing without any battery concerns in days past.

So today is the first day that I’ve disabled Latitude on my phone as well, and I have no intention of charging it in the car today either.  We’ll see what happens this evening.

It’s unfortunate really, because I’ve found that Latitude is one of those things where you like to Fire and Forget(tm) – that is, turn on the tracking service (privacy concerns notwithstanding) and it’s always available when you need it.  Sometimes it’s a safety consideration, other times it’s a simple matter of convenience.  I’ve even taken to using the Location History to do some data mining.

But until the battery life issues are worked out, it’s no more always-on Latitude for me.

[update 2011/04/06] Well Latitude is back on my phone.  As usual a number of variables have changed on my phone – WiFi is being turned off by Tasker unless I’m on a “home” cell tower, and I’ve upgraded Maps to the latest and greatest (v5.2 I think).

Anyhow, battery life is acceptable at this point (although a Mugen 1800mAh battery is en-route).  And it would seem that updates aren’t going out every 6 minutes – on my phone at least.  Looking through the data logs on Shelly’s phone I was dismayed to see packet data activity every 6 minutes throughout the day – surely an indication of Latitude phoning home.

You may wonder why Latitude is again active on the wifey’s phone.  Hey, you’ll have to ask her – I turned it off a few times and it’s magically gone back on again each time.

So I’ll have to take a look into the WiFi settings on her phone.  I was under the impression that Symbian is very sane about powering the WiFi module, only doing so when an application explicitly requests data access.  And while this could still allow Latitude to request WiFi when it wakes up every 6 minutes, I was of the belief that the user had to explicitely select a predefined WiFi “access point” to use, or else tell the phone to go searching for an available WiFi network.  Which is to say, unless their’s human intervention, the phone shouldn’t be turning the WiFi module on.

So either my understanding of WiFi on Symbian is wrong, or Latitude on Symbian is a just a different beast altogether and it’s misbehaving badly.