Imagine smartphone GPS that uses 99.96% less power

How is such a concept possible? If you guessed the cloud, you are on the money. Microsoft Research is working on a project which, in broad strokes off-loads the high-power consuming tasks to the cloud. It is being called, Cloud-Offloaded GPS (CO-GPS). We all know that GPS is a power-hungry feature and unless you are packing a charging cable or have a device with a ginormous-sized power cell, it is not practical to use navigation with impunity on a road trip and still have enough power for a functioning device. In the current environment, this limits the usefulness of GPS in many applications. GPS location acquisition is the giant power grab every time. There Read More..