A person is sent back in time 30 years to 1993 and they still have their phone. The phone is an iphone 11. It is on a contract. The battery is fully charged. The phone has a number of apps on it including the most popular social media apps and some local apps such as a step counter, camera, voice...
Interesting period: GPS was just coming to completion between 1993 and 1995. I'm not certain but I don't think the GPS on your phone would have enough satellites to work reliably yet on 4/17/1993. But it seems like otherwise it would be a lot like being in airplane mode.
@Wyck Moreover, GPS at the time was intentionally scrambled, so even if you could get enough satellites to talk to your phone, you likely wouldn't be able to get better than 30-50 meter resolution (for what it's worth).
That being said, I don't think that civilian use of GPS was enabled until 1998 or 1999 (it was a Big Deal™ when we had some fancy Trimble devices to use in the field when doing archaeological survey in the summer of 1999).
@XanderHenderson, My Dad bought one of the first GPS receivers that became available to civilians some time in the late 1980s. It was maybe 1/3 the size of a shoe box, It ran on six D-Cell batteries, and it could track as many as four satellites at one time. It didn't have any map, but its low-res, black & white display could show a 2D plot in which the dot in the middle was yourself, and the other dots were your nearby waypoints. And yeah, Accuracy was in that 30-50 meter range on a good day. Could get as bad as 100 meters before it gave up and told you, "no fix."
@SolomonSlow Okay, that seems reasonable. I know that after my freshman year of college (summer of 1999), I went to work for the BLM, and we had to stand at a spot for 10 minutes to collect enough data to get a reasonable picture of where we were (you could average the GPS scrambling to get reasonable accuracy for archaeological work). The following summer (2000), just after the US military stopped scrambling the signal, we could get the same level of precision in a few seconds. This was a big deal. Prior to that, I had little experience with GPS.
@XanderHenderson GPS was never descrambled. What happened was they released the spec and the keys (PRN codes). This occurred in the 1980's, the KAL shootdown that triggered this was 1983.
If you want rechargability, then pick a different modern phone. Many modern Android phones still have a removable battery, so you can use any laboratory power supply with an amperage limit to charge it.
@XanderHenderson that's far from true. Civilian GPS receivers for "normal people" (boaters, hikers, the first in-car GPS navigation) came on the market in 1990-1991.
the story could be funny if the protagonist could bring a laptop 30 years back with them. like a new raptor lake (2023) or so, suddently he had the fastest device on the planet and could hack anything or setup a webpage in a few seconds
The GPS option is fascinating. I never thought that would be a possibility and it would be an incredible addition to the plot if my character could use it. I need to pick this over and see if it works.
@XanderHenderson in May 2000, Clinton's government switched off selective availability, hence improving GPS accuracy to ~5m. That begat geocaching.
Without the Internet and working cell network, smartphones will at best take a long time to get satellite fix, because they rely on AGPS (internet-assisted gps) a lot. Also I suspect the phone will not be able to connect to the cell network due to change in ciphers, protocols and frequencies. I think that in 1993 the existing cell networks were all analog still (NMT instead of GSM), but I will not bother to check.
Putting your phone on airplane mode and turning off wifi provides a pretty decent simulation of what you'd be able to do with a smartphone in the past (until the battery runs out).
Assuming that you're in an area where GSM was already available and assuming you can successfully connect to the network (two very uncertain assumptions), would it be able to update its internal clock from the network? And would the phone freak out because nobody had tested any software with a pre-2000 date? Imagine the fun of a reverse Y2K :)
The contract is a 2023 contract. That phone and model (iphone 11) suits my character's financial situation. It could be changed especially if it gave me access to gps.
Discussion on question by AvengingEar…
Discussion on question by AvengingEar…