RE: renaming enableHighAccuracy

Angel - I agree with your point on power consumption. Power consumption is an area that many products are improving all of the time. Power consumption of one location method vs another is changing in the marketplace all of the time also. 

For me, a user (or the applications they use) will have no way of knowing whether GPS vs Wifi vs 3G is more or less power on their device. 

That is why I think this attribute doesn't really belong in the API as there is no way to make know what to set the attribute to.

Finally, my previous suggestion on clarifying the intent of the attribute was trying to make it clearer what is the defined behavior for the attribute *if* it stays in the API.

Allan

-----Original Message-----
From: Angel Machín [mailto:angel.machin@gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 8:46 AM
To: Andrei Popescu
Cc: Allan Thomson (althomso); public-geolocation
Subject: Re: renaming enableHighAccuracy

Hi Allan, Andrei,

Just a couple of comments:

1 - The concept of "high power method" is ambiguous, which are those high power location providers? GPS?
Nowadays, there are GPS receivers that consume just 1 mA.
(http://www.air-semi.com/media/pdf/AIR_firstcustomersrelease_FINAL.pdf)

On the other hand, CellID or WiFi data has to be translated into lat/long by invoking some Web Service. In case we are using a mobile phone this could suppose a certain impact in battery life.

I mean, with these next generation GPS receivers the concept of low power method to retrieve location is not clear. How is the UA going to decide this?

2 - In any case, If I have a mobile with a GPS (or any other hardware) consuming a large amount of energy, I think it wouldn't be acceptable that it would be switched on just because I am browsing a certain web page with the "enableHighAccuracy" attribute set (or "lowPowerOnly=false").

I would prefer to have this parameter removed. I think that the way of retrieving location should be specified by users in the UA user interface, in the same way (as an example) that GoogleMaps Mobile does with the "use GPS" option.


Cheers,

Angel

Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2009 16:01:45 UTC