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Possible Duplicate:
How does the GPS work on Android phones?

I have a Galaxy Player 5.0 (A.K.A Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) which as you're probably aware is not a phone, but an android-powered MP3 player.

The other day I decided to test out its GPS and it worked flawlessly. But that got me thinking about how that's possible.

It can't triangulate my position from cell towers because it doesn't connect to any. It can't triangulate my position from WiFi hotspots because it knows where i am even without hotspots around.

Does it actually connect to a satellite to get my location like normal GPS units?

Note: This questions is different from the one posted here: How GPS works in android phone because he was concerned with locational privacy whereas I'm actually concerned with functionality. The answers on his question did not answer my question.

Community
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Mark Kramer
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2 Answers2

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The Galaxy Player 5 specs straight from Samsung indicate that the device has a receiver for standard GPS satellite signals, which is sufficient for navigation.

Cellular triangulation and WiFi location are examples of Assisted GPS or aGPS. As its name implies it is a supplementary system designed to speed up location finding, because because it can take time to lock onto GPS satellites, and locking onto enough to be reliable is not always possible.

choster
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Most of the Android phone has GPS receiver and most of them uses aGPS system.

roxan
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