The Global Positioning System was fully launched in 1995 by the US military and, despite advancements to technology, it still moves pretty slowly. Is there a way smartphones could protect their GPS chips from overusing the battery? A lot of this has to do with GPS technology being old. (The professors used older devices like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Sony Xperia Z2 for their experiments, but it’s safe to say the concept still holds true.) If you have GPS on and a strong signal, you lose 13 percent of battery compared to 38 percent if the signal is weakĪ 2016 study by computer engineering professors in the UK and Saudi Arabia found that under a good signal strength, a battery depletes 13 percent while a weak signal could cause the battery to drop up to 38 percent. Similarly, you can imagine that if you’re traveling fast through a bullet train or in a car, your signal weakens and battery gets drained faster, partly due to the metal roof and partly due to how many nearby satellites your GPS receiver searches through. If you’re in a poor signal area and your location services are on, that can drain your smartphone battery far more than if you’re in an area with strong signal. “It dials through all the different satellites looking for a signal.” McGwier, research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech. “If you go inside a Walmart metal roofs, the phone will go into high consumption if location services are turned on,” says Robert W. The GPS chip is constantly listening for satellites, and if you head underground or are in a place that blocks the signal, like under a metal roof or a Costco, the phone will go into random search mode. With GPS turned on, your phone can’t enter sleep mode. While the GPS chip in your phone isn’t able to send signals out, it is constantly receiving signals in order to triangulate your exact positioning. Once you activate location services, that’s when your phone starts to listen for satellites - yep, the ones placed into orbit on what’s called a GPS constellation. Maybe your phone can guess what state or city you’re in, but not the exact neighborhood. Think of it as turning on your map when you’re in airplane mode.
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you just would not be able to download maps to view your position, so you would see a blue dot in the middle of nowhere,” Columbia Engineering associate professor of electrical engineering Harish Krishnaswamy says in an email interview. Without cellular data or Wi-Fi, the GPS receiver guesses your location. First, your GPS receiver - a small chip and antennae located inside your smartphone - is always listening to cell towers, which give it a rough estimate of where you are at all times. Here’s what’s really happening when you turn on location services. But which is it? Why do smartphone batteries drain so much faster when it’s using GPS? Have you ever turned on location services and noticed your smartphone battery drain in a matter of minutes? People have come up with theories of why that’s happening: maybe you forgot to quit an app that keeps tracking your location, or your phone’s too busy searching for connections to cell towers and satellites.