What? Still No GNSS?

[gcoupe]

I am really surprised that Microsoft has still not seen fit to include GNSS capability in any of their Surface products (other than their Surface 2 LTE device, where GNSS comes riding on the back of the WWAN chip). A dedicated GNSS chip (such as the Broadcomm BCM47521) consumes little in the way of real estate or power. Location services are part of the Windows 8.1 operating system, and many Apps (e.g. maps, weather, astronomy, photography) make use of them. To my mind, many line of business Apps built for reps out in the field would naturally use Location services.

All models of the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 come with GNSS as standard (as do the newly announced successor, the ThinkPad Tablet 10). Having used Apps that exploit GNSS on my TPT2, I really don’t want to go backwards and lose this capability in my next tablet. It seems to me that Microsoft has missed an opportunity here to provide leadership. As far as I’m concerned, it takes the edge off the claim that the SP3 is the “best of a laptop, best of a tablet” product.

 

[benjitek]

I'm glad there isn't GPS or LTE in the SP3 -- that way I don't feel so bad being only a few months into the purchase of my SP2 and not being able to afford a new SP3 ;-)

 

[gcoupe]

Hah! Yes, I can sympathise. In my case, Microsoft's dropping the GNSS ball will mean that my next tablet won't be an SP3.

 

[gcoupe]

I see that the latest version of the web pages for the Surface Pro 3 now includes an item for "Location" in the Tech Specs section. Unfortunately, it gives "Digital Compass" as the entry. To my way of thinking this is somewhat disingenuous of Microsoft. A compass gives you direction - not location. So clearly there's no way of getting an accurate location using the sensors of an SP3...