World’s first dual-frequency GNSS smartphone hits the market

Contributing and equipment Smartphones
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Once again, now they tell me :disappointed_relieved:

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too bad its another phone that is taking away useful features like a headphone jack, screen space (the notch) and an sd card slot

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Following this posting by @filipc I ended up getting a used Huawei Mate 20 Pro in december, which has support for dual-frequency GNSS. It works great!

As the refered article and others points out, it ends up giving a significant increese in acuracy. For instance I can now see which side of the road I was cycling on, which was not possible with my older phone.

An interesting aspect is that we usually recomend getting a camera with built in GNSS receiver because it is more convinient. With phones getting this level of acuracy the advice is not so strong from my point.

Getting location from a smart phone takes more work. Even if the camera is connected to the phone, you must record a GPX track in case it fails and be prepared to geotag. But the gain is that it is possible to get 3-5 meter acuracy even when conditions are not perfect. My old phone and action cams would get me 10 meters at best, often worse.

Regarding the comments by @dave683. I hate that the phone does not have a headphone jack, but it comes with a USB-C to headphone adapter, so most of the time I don’t notice it. You can get them cheaply on ebay, so I have them on all of my headphones. It turned out to not be a problem. There even are adapters with a USB-C connector so you can charge and use headphones at the same time. It is not perfect having an adapter, but it is ok.

In my old phone I had a 64 GB micro SD cardb but this Huawei has a propriatary slot for a card which is quite expensive. But because the phone has 128 GB of memory I am not even close to needing it yet.

Finally my biggest problem was comparing phones. Most shops and no search engines lists dual frequence GNSS at all. I had to refer to this article Dual-frequency GNSS on Android devices | by Sean Barbeau | Medium to get something that resembled a list of phones. The list would be much bigger today.

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My new smartphone shows accuracy of 2-3 meters.

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My Xiaomi too, even less than 2 meters. Estimated accuracy doesn’t mean everything though, I have compared the Redmi Note 8 Pro against the Garmin Oregon in this video:

Redmi’s accuracy is very sensitive to other things that are running on the device, accuracy is fluctuating a bit compared to the Garmin, which seems more stable. Often the Redmi’s GPS track shows it is capable of a higher accuracy though.

PS My phone doesnt’seem to support dual-frequency GNSS:
https://i.postimg.cc/xTq3tMfx/gpstest.jpg

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Yes, it is important to know that estimated acuracy is estimated to be correct about 60% of the times. The other times it can be wrong.

When I stated that my phone gave 3-4 meters acuracy I have been looking at various apps that shows where I am.

Dual frequency mainly fixes multipath issues, where a radio signal bounces off various objects so they arrive multiple times at the receiver or so only a bounced signal arrives. Various frequences does not bounce in the same way so acuracy is higher under challenging conditions.

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World’s first dual-frequency GNSS watch hits the market.

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There is no news on the Samsung S24, I suppose it is OK.

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These specifications do not mention it =

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Finally

Samsung SM-S928B Galaxy S24 Ultra 14 34 2023 Qualcomm GNSS GEN9 SUPPORTED GPS, GALILEO, BEIDOU B1, B1C, B2a, E1, E5a, L1, L5 SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED 3.10.3 24097 google FI 01/24/2024 01:05:11 PM (GMT) 2024-01-24T13:05:11Z S928BXXU1AWM9 REL e3q
Samsung SM-S928B Galaxy S24 Ultra 14 34 2023 Qualcomm GNSS GEN9 SUPPORTED GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, BEIDOU B1, B1C, B2a, E1, E5a, L1, L5 SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED SUPPORTED NOT_SUPPORTED 3.10.3 24097 google FI 01/25/2024 09:13:03 AM (GMT) 2024-01-25T09:13:03Z S928BXXU1AWM9 REL e3q
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