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As a part of the December Pixel Feature Drop, Google announced a new feature for select Pixel phones called Adaptive Charging. The idea for Adaptive Charging was to offer a solution that could help
take care of your battery by charging it steadily over a long period of time rather than quickly.
I’m not sure there was a lot of confusion about how Adaptive Charging would work (we assumed it worked at night and trickle charged a phone), but a Google support page for the feature lays out exactly when your Pixel 4, Pixel 4a, or Pixel 5 will try and trigger it.
In an Android developers’ blog post titled “Improving urban GPS accuracy for your app,” satnav expert and a principal engineer at Google Frank van Diggelen reports that the company has addressed “the last great unsolved GPS problem”: the wrong-side-of-the-street position error.
While this may not be the last nor the greatest GPS problem, it is one encountered by ride-share requesters and in-car navigators looking for a specific street address: multipath and other urban canyon-created errors.
“Our solution uses 3D mapping-aided corrections, and is only feasible to be done at scale by Google because it comprises 3D building models, raw GPS measurements, and machine learning. The December Pixel Feature Drop adds 3D mapping aided GPS corrections to Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a (5G). With a system API that provides feedback to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 5G Mobile Platform that powers Pixel, the accuracy in cities (or “urban canyons”) improves spectacularly.”
Google to improve urban GPS accuracy for apps
Originally posted in the Android Developers Blog, the following is reprinted with permission from authors Frank van Diggelen, principal engineer, and Jennifer Wang, product manager, Google.
At Android, we want to make it as easy as possible for developers to create the most helpful apps for their users. That’s why we aim to provide the best location experience with our APIs like the Fused Location Provider API (FLP). However, we’ve heard from many of you that the biggest location issue is inaccuracy in dense urban areas, such as wrong-side-of-the-street and even wrong-city-block errors.
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