This just out from the MEMS Congress in Europe this week:
Some of my own personal observations:
- I don’t agree with the article that pressure sensors are only tied to indoor nav, as I can see clear benefits in the area of fitness to know altitude changes (using the pressure sensor).
- I can see some phone vendors not including every sensor known to man in phones if the features aren’t used. I know some people disable a lot of the gesture controls in the settings menu because they feel the controls are gimmicky and do degrade battery life (for instance, the ones that use the camera to know if the viewer is looking at the display, or use hand gesture to swipe through the photo album).
- There were two ‘knocks’ in the article about indoor nav – one is the fact that consumers don’t want to be spammed (push mode) and the second is that it isn’t accurate enough (pull mode). It will be interesting to know if the second is addressed would it be a value for the consumer. The first one seems like it could be handled with privacy controls at the user level (provided the operator allows that). I only hear positive comments on Google Now from people that use it (myself included) and it seems to me that indoor location will only help make this a more useful app
