The Epson Infineon is a 12th generation GPS transmitter/receiver built upon a 65nm manufacturing process. Just 2.8 × 2.9mm (or 25% smaller than any A-GPS on the market), it’s still powerful enough to communicate with satellites indoors, tracking you to the Motel 6 before your loved one discovers you—living a second life in which you rent Motel 6 rooms just to hang out and watch bad cable alone. [News via Engadget]

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• Dual-band UMTS/HSDPA (850MHz/2100MHz)
• 950 mAh battery
• 105.5 x 53.5 x 15.8 mm
• 240×480 2.8-inch LCD
• 3 megapixel fixed-focus camera, with VGA video capability
• 100MB of memory with microSD support up to 16GB
• Bluetooth 2.0
• USB 2.0
• Wi-Fi
• EMP U330 Lite Chipset

While there’s no info on exactly what OS the unit’ll be running, there is word that it’s under testing in AT&T’s labs and should hit the streets before Christmas. [BGR]

Telstra just keeps rolling out those extra services to NextG customers. After the QR codes the other week, they’ve backed it up with some location-based software that uses A-GPS to locate where your friends and family are, making stalking your ex-girlfriend monitoring your kids whereabouts incredibly simple.

And once you get past the obvious nefarious uses, there are also some pretty useful practical applications for this. Like if you lose your phone (or it’s stolen), you can use a friend’s phone to locate yours. Or if you’re meeting up with some mates and they’re not answering their phone – you can just use this to find out roughly where they are.

The software itself is a free download, but getting the location of your mates has a fee (of course) – it’s 50 cents for a one-time thing lookup, plus 30 cents to actually receive the location alert. Alternatively, you can pay $2.95 each month and get unlimited searches (although it will still cost you 30 cents for each alert you receive.)

And even though we joked about stalking, you do need to have the person you’re trying to stalk you’re locating to accept your invitation before you can receive their location updates, and that may be kind of hard. I mean, you could always try and do it yourself, but that restraining order just keeps making things difficult, doesn’t it?

[Telstra]

One of neato aspects of the iPhone 3G’s engineering is that it crams a whole bunch of wireless stuff, like 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS into just two antennas, which are integrated into the “metal ring around the camera, the audio jack, the metal screen bezel, and the iPhone circuitry itself.” But that doesn’t mean it’s always going to get a solid GPS signal (same with most phones), like when it’s indoors or between skyscrapers. So it uses assisted GPS, also known as aGPS or A-GPS, like most phones with “GPS,” though it can mean a couple different things.

In the iPhone’s case, it means location is determined with a combo of GPS, Wi-Fi and cell towers, depending on what’s available—and all that data is crunched by the “assistance server.” There are several benefits to A-GPS. It’s wayyy faster for one. With vanilla GPS, to get a lock, you need several strong signals for a decent length of time. With A-GPS, the assistance server tells your phone where the closest satellites are and does the serious computational legwork, cutting down the number of frequencies the phone has to scan and the numbers it has to smash, making the whole process a lot faster. Also, the server can take paltry, choppy ones and make use of ‘em. And this all makes it a lot more battery friendly too.

The nicest thing about the iPhone 3G’s setup is that the you-are-here circle indicates how accurate the assistance server’s guesstimation is, like when it derives your location in less than ideal conditions. Unlike some phones’ A-GPS, Apple implies iPhone’s A-GPS will still work without a cell signal (it “finds your location via GPS or by triangulating your position…”) in case you’re camping or just in the boonies. (Update: As commenters have pointed out, an issue would be getting the Google maps, which need to be downloaded via cell or Wi-Fi. A third-party app from TomTom or such with locally stored maps would solve that problem, so main issue is still the chip’s capabilities to work without assistance.)

It’s unknown how hard the GPS is going to punch the battery life. The iPhone turns it on and off “quickly and automatically” when needed. But we anticipate it’ll sock it pretty good when the chip’s actually active, especially for decent stretches–like during live tracking, possibly, but we think it might power on the receiver only at needed intervals to save juice, doing the rest of the crunching internally or by other means if they’re available (like cell towers).

Okay, so the only hands on time we’ve had with the iPhone’s GPS apps comes from Brian’s brief time with it, and that did reveal a couple quirks. (Well for one, it couldn’t quite find him.) Maps and photo geotagging both asked him for permission to use his location, which kinda bugged him, but since he got the first demo, I’m relatively certain it only does that the first time you use the phone, like the E911 option.
In case you’re wondering about the live traffic info, that’s been Google mojo for a while.

Hopes for a more robust or simply different navigation app from one of the majors like Garmin, TomTom or Telenav are foggy right now. TomTom says they’ve got one running already, but there’s also a weird clause in the SDK that would seem to prohibit other GPS apps. On the other hand, big companies could talk to Apple directly (and very probably are) to get their apps okayed on the iPhone, which would be smart for both parties. It’ll make the iPhone an even more serious GPS device, and it’ll give the established makers a piece of the pie they fear losing. But we’d still like to see some sweet (and free) homebrew stuff too. [Giz Explains]

Something we missed, or you still wanna know? Send any questions about 3G, GPS, G-spots or anything else to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.