First, let’s talk about performance of the GPS chip itself. So far I’ve been very impressed. The GPS in the iPad gets a position fix faster than my iPhone 3G, and doesn’t drop the fix nearly as often. The accuracy looks very good. From what I’ve seen so far the GPS performance in the iPad is better than the iPhone 3G.

What follows are not “reviews” of these apps– we’ve already done that in most cases. Rather just a few short notes about any idiosyncrasies or issues specifically related to running the current iPhone apps on the iPad.

The one app I tried that I did have issues with was the TomTom App. It complained when I launched the app that it wasn’t connected to a GPS, and then continued to flash “Connect to GPS” in the title bar. Ironically, it could track my current position as I drove along, however it would not update my route progress. For example I created a route and it would show the highlighted route, but it wouldn’t show me the distance to the next turn nor provide any voice guidance. All it did was draw the route on the map. In all fairness, these apps were not designed for the iPad but it is interesting that this particular app choked while others didn’t. I imagine this will be addressed.