Originally Posted By: mlord
Originally Posted By: altman
GPS is one thing which does truly suck power (can easily take almost half a watt

That seems odd to me. There are numerous GPS chips out there that run on 3.3V and suck less than 30mA, which I suppose equates to about 1/10th of a watt.


Yeah, I know, I was amazed too given the chips I'd used years before that were in the 30mA ballpark... some of the phone gps chips do the frontend stuff in "the gps chip" but run the algorithms in software on the baseband, which makes it cheaper but means you don't have all those specialized hardware that proper GPS chips have which is a lot more efficient about tracking satellites.

iPhone4 is more in the state of the art ballpark for GPS power though...