Any smartphone user who has used GPS for navigation or location based services would know how much of a “Battery Hog” GPS on the phones can be. They drain your battery at an exponential rate.
SONY – low powered GPS Chipsets
Thankfully, Sony was paying attention to it and all this will end soon. Sony is all set to launch ultra-low powered GPS chips D5600 and D5601, which are limited to use only about 10 mW of power for its operation.
Its futuristic not only because it’s such a low power Chipset but also because of it’s ability to interact and integrate itself with other sensors like the Accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. Typically bundled together as Motion sensors that are mainstream in most smartphones these days. Imagine being able to navigate using your Mobile GPS without “Battery Hogging” and being able to get much better position accuracies at the same time. Now that’s something I hope I can get my hands on in the immediate future.
The use of Motion sensors is not going to reduce the time it takes for the first fix i.e. the time it takes to get a location when we first switch on our Mobile GPS. It’s going to help reduce the time it takes to get a location when we lose GPS signals in a tunnel, etc. The main purpose of using motion sensors is to be able to supplement the location computation when we don’t have GPS satellites to help locate our position. Its basically using GPS+IMU
But I am surprised that Sony isn’t going to utilize wireless technologies in combination with GPS which would allow smooth integration of Indoor and Outdoor positioning. I am hoping that they would. The chips however would be able to use GPS, GLONASS, SBAS and QZSS apart from MEMS. Quite a few constellations for a chip that is billed as ultra-low power consuming.
When can you get one of these? did I say Immediate future! Okay, if you consider production time, product verification, etc soon is sometime next year maybe! Considering the fact that these chips are scheduled for launch this June and the smartphone manufacturers will then have to build their phones around it.
Until then, for all of us for whom its a choice between getting lost or losing battery life; I suggest portable chargers 😉
Sources: Tech Wired
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When you want to go out, you’d like to have a live feedback about what’s happening right now at the location. Yelp and Foursquare gives you great info about the general atmosphere, but it’s usually not real-time, so you might find review what to order but you won’t get information how busy it the bar tonight… Jabberly is trying to solve that problem and has launched an iOS app that allows people to use their mobile devices to ask questions about a particular location and get answers quickly from those who are already there.
Ok. But even if you’re social media savvy, giving real-time feedback to people asking is a kind of effort… Jabberly found a cool way to give users incentives by including a feature called jabberCRED that can be earned by providing insider tips and recommendations. These points can be used as virtual currency to receive real money vouchers. Currently the service operates on iPhones only in US with the biggest concentration in San Francisco.
Unfortunately the idea is not entirely new… you might already now Localmind… however the concept of giving users tangible incentives is really cool and this is what might the biggest future success factor of the app.
source: The Next Web
