Magnetometer in next iPhone confirmed?
We just got a couple images from one of our Apple ninjas and it appears to show a compass option in one of the debugging menus. Our source says this is obviously for a built-in magnetometer in the upcoming iPhone hardware revision and with what’s already been reported, we’d have to agree. One more image after the break!
Magnetosomes, magnetotactic bacteria, are biologic magnets used by birds, for example, to guide their inner compass and their sense of direction, giving them ability to distinguish the compass points, allowing them to know when to fly North in the spring and fly South in the fall.
Can i dump my log in the kitchen sink? or would that backup my NVRAM???Someone please answer??!!
And where’s the news about a compass in a mobile phone???
Nokia N97’s already got it :0D
Would be nice if you could have all this information transmitted (optionally, of course) to the same messaging servers Apple is creating for 3.0, and allowing applications (with need to opt in, of course) to this information, allowing the applications that never took off on the iPhone to actually take off. Things like Whrll, or who’s here, etc. Could actually work, notifying you of when your friends are near you as they can on other platforms where applications can work in the background. Combining the new notification API with a location beacon would be ideal, and some of the above logging points its way to applications being able to take much better advantage of background location logging. For example, all the routing applications need to be continuously active to follow a path. If they are quit, they can only interpolate information. If they had access to the log, they could “fill in the gaps” so to speak on their route. Or better yet, just use this central location log as their routing log. I don’t know about you, but those screenshots tell a lot of really interesting things!
Hi Mickis,
So what that Nokia already has a compass, presumably before Apple? Nokia was also first with the smartphone. It may have been first with many other apps/features/capabilities.
It might have a lot of things, but it’s likely that few care enough about a phone compass just to buy a N97.
What is relevant to this report is that the market has a higher chance to embrace an iPhone, as well as to focus on what’s newly available on it, the most important smartphone for consumers, growing in the business space, and gaining significance markets over-all.
GPS will only give you direction if you’re moving, bozo.
All that and more. But you can keep your keyboards. I don’t need no stinking keyboards. I don’t do buttons anymore…
Now, all we need is a built in taser gun….. for self protection of course…
Well as others already have replied below: SO freaking what if Nokia has a compass? That doesn’t put a compass in the new iPhone. Or do you feel the same way about any/all phone that can send text messages: “Well my phone can send text messages already!!” Without knowing much about the Nokia N97 I sincerely doubt that it is even half the fun and has even a fraction of the elegance of an iPhone.
So you just hold on to your Nokia and let the rest of us enjoy the iPhone
Over and out from Denmark