While everybody is locked in their laboratories coming up with new ideas and testing new solutions, CEO Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm just announced in San Diego that the company has developed a wondrous new technology that enables smartphones to user either GPS or Russia’s Glonass satellite for location possibilities.
Today, most smartphones require a line of site fix to four different satellites in order to determine where a device is located. And since the satellites are spread out above the Earth and are moving all the time, it’s very annoying to get a proper signal and often a time consuming endeavor. But with the help of the additional 27 GLONASS satellites as reference nodes, site determination is more precise and done more quickly. Using this technology, the phone’s location can be found with great accuracy of within two meters.
Another benefit, Qualcomm brings with this is prolonged battery life, because the GLONASS service is only turned on when the Snapdragon processor can not find the location using the default GPS satellites.
The Glonass connectivity is set to become available for T-Mobile’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S II and will be available soon on other devices as well. Qualcomm’s S2 and S3 series Snapdragon processors are already good to go with dual satellite networks.
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