GLONASS to come to future Xperia phones

We’ll not blame you, if you haven’t heard of GLONASS. It has not been deployed on a wide range of smartphones, but now, as reported by the Verge, GLONASS will be coming soon to all of Sony’s upcoming smartphones. For those not in the know, GLONASS has been in existence since 1976 and it stands for Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema.

To come with GLONASS

‘Global’ ‘Navigatsion’ ‘Sputnik’ ‘Sistem’ give an immediate hint that it’s somewhat related to navigations and satellites. Yes, it’s a satellite based positioning system, but is owned and maintained by the Russian Space Forces. The Sony Ericsson Developer World site has thrown some more light into this new navigation system in their introduction - GLONASS development started way back in 1976, but it was not until October 2011 that full global coverage with modern satellites was achieved with 24 active satellites. Hence, the number of GLONASS-only devices is very limited.

As a default, GLONASS will only be able to feature on devices that have Qualcomm Snapdragon S2 or S2 processors. What’s interesting to know is that a few of the current handsets are also capable of supporting GLONASS. The full range of handsets is given below:

• Xperia S
• Xperia Ion
• Xperia Arc
• Xperia Arc S
• Xperia Ray
• Xperia Neo
• Xperia Pro
• Xperia Play
• Xperia Active
• Live with Walkman

GLONASS - coming soon to Xperia phones

GLONASS will come handy when your device is near high rise buildings, and where there is too much crowding out. It has got extremely precise pin pointing capabilities and is much more accurate than GPS. However, it does tend to take a little out of the battery life, so according to their developer site, the GLONASS receiver will get activated only when you are having problems in your current location – due to high sky rises. In an open environment, GLONASS will be automatically turned off to save power and battery life on your Sony phone. If your GPS is off, GLONASS will be off by default.

Sony trying to get more quality into their handsets is definitely beneficial for consumers, but we hope that this doesn’t mean a steep price rise into their already relatively expensive Xperia handsets.