Galaxy Nexus barometer explained

By George Wong on 10/21/2011 09:19 PDT

Galaxy Nexus Barometer When the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was revealed earlier this week, it had one interesting feature that was mentioned but not discussed: its onboard barometer. Now you might be wondering; what could a phone possibly do with information about the air pressure? To provide you with more accurate weather info? Well, it turns out the answer is simpler than we thought.

As you all know, the barometer is used to determine air pressure, and air pressure is also affected by how high we are above sea level, which in turn can give us our altitude. Seeing how a GPS lock requires our latitude, longitude and altitude, having an onboard barometer to provide the altitude can result in a faster and more accurate GPS lock.

And in case you didn’t know, the Motorola Xoom tablet also features a barometer for this very same purpose, though it wasn’t really discussed before. The Galaxy Nexus will be the first Android phone to have this sensor. You can read up more about it here.

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Android Android is mobile operating system from Google. The software was originally built by a company called Android Inc, that was purchased by Google in 2005. From its modest debuts, Android has become a powerhouse that powers not only smartphones and tablet, but a host of other less high-profile devices and gadgets. Although Android is not a community-driven project, Google does release the source code as open-source under the Apache license.

Galaxy Nexus The Samsung Galaxy Nexus was the first smartphone to officially receive Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich. The Galaxy Nexus was launched in Hong Kong on Oct 19 2011 and has debuted commercially in Europe as a carrier-free and unlocked GSM phone, and later arrived to the USA under the same name on the Verizon network. Although its internal hardware is pretty much equivalent in performance to the older Galaxy S2, the Galaxy Nexus has a great design with a curved glass 720p display. It is powered by a TI OMAP 4460 with 1GB of RAM and a Power VR SGX540 GPU.

Samsung Samsung is a South-Korean conglomerate which counts many subsidiaries like Samsung Electronics, which you probably know very well, but also Samsung Heavy Industries which builds ships, or Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Securities and many more. Samsung is responsible for an amazing 20% of South Korea's exports. In the consumer electronics world, Samsung has gone from being a company with a reputation for cheap products to becoming one of the most respected companies in the world.

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