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Hi,
Does anyone know how much battery power the GPS receiver uses, and how it works. Ie. does it only switch on when requested to by an App, and then turn off again after some time out? Is there a way of making sure it is turned off, or even disabling it completely when you don't want it wasting battery juice?
Thanks.
Chris.
The power consumption for the GPS receiver is insignificant, it is a passive receiver rather than an active transmitter. Any increased load associated with GPS use will be caused by the apps which use GPS, and you using the screen to view results. You can disable the GPS in the Settings screens, but I suspect the screen and backlight while you find the setting and change it would use more energy than the GPS uses in a day.
Thanks for your answer, and fair enough, I won't worry about the power consumption.
Just for my own curiosity though, where in the settings can you turn GPS off? I went through them earlier, and just now, and can't see GPS settings mentioned anywhere, unless I just can't see for looking!!
Chris.
As long as your PB is turned on, the drivers that make the GPS and other hardware available to apps are also "on", The GPS chip is no different from any other hardware on the device. For example, your device's storage is always "on" and waiting for apps to request information from the file system. The system drivers that keep the hardware in a wait state consume very little energy. But if you are watching a movie using the media player or if Bing is requesting your location and downloading hundreds of map tiles per minute, your battery drains much faster.
What does the Playbook use to determine your position ... satellite ?? If so, does the GPS ap provide that connection or does the playbook need to be connected to the internet?
An internet connection is not needed.
The pb uses satellites to get position information. It needs apps to turn that position info into data a human can use. Those apps can be free (like Bing and some of the Android mapping programs) or paid. If you can find an app that can save certain data (maps for instance) to the pb, you would not need the internet while moving around. Otherwise the internet would be required.